If you’re a fan of audio SF drama, you need to be listening to Steal the Stars, the inaugural podcast from Tor Labs created by Mac Rogers (whose contribution to Torchwood: Aliens Among Us has also just been released). In the 14-part saga Rogers combines noir and SF to create a unique tale – the story of Dakota Prentiss and Matt Salem, two government employees guarding the biggest secret in the world: a crashed UFO. Despite being forbidden to fraternize, Dak and Matt fall in love and decide to escape to a better life on the wings of an incredibly dangerous plan: they’re going to steal the alien body they’ve been guarding and sell the secret of its existence. The writer chatted over Skype with Paul Simpson…

I came to hear about Steal the Stars via Marco Palmieri, who’s been a friend for many years since he was editing the Star Trek books for Simon & Schuster…

I’m just figuring how much of a fixture Marco has been in the science fiction scene for so long!

Marco is an editor at Tor who works with Jen Gunnels, who has been coming to see science fiction plays that my colleagues and I have been putting on for a number of years. Marco came with her to see the most recent – a trilogy of SF plays called The Honeycomb Trilogy – and shortly afterwards I was involved in writing two SF audio dramas for Panoply and GE, called The Message and LifeAfter. Those were successful enough that Marco and Jen were able to go to Macmillan [Tor’s parent company] and say they’d like to produce an audio drama with us.

One of my foremost producers, Sean Williams, has a long history of producing audio and we decided to work together on it. I sent a series of pitches to Tor to see if any of them were of particular interest to them, and Steal the Stars was their favourite. Around mid-March they proposed a collaboration and from then it’s been a dead run to get ready for the first Wednesday in August release date.

The process had to move first, but that’s how I always write – I write everything to a brutally fast deadline. If someone gave me six months the sad truth is I’d probably start in the last three weeks.

Marco was one of the people involved in setting up and creating Tor Labs which is a new imprint of Tor Books. It is going to try a number of different methods of experimental science fiction storytelling and in this particular case, an audio drama followed by a novelisation that is coming out [on November 7], a week after the final episode.

That was written by another colleague of mine, Nat Cassidy, a playwright I’ve known for a number of years who’s written science fiction and horror plays that have appeared in New York. He’s also written some fiction as well. Sean and I brought him on in the hope he’d write one of the subsequent audio dramas that we’d like to produce down the road, but when Tor said that they’d like to have a novelisation to come out in tandem with the podcast, they said to me I could write it, or bring another writer in.

I knew for a fact that I wasn’t going to have time to write it on top of the radio scripts, and I don’t really have a prose voice whereas Nat has. I said to him, “Why don’t you make a pitch to them to see if you can do it?” They asked for sample chapters, he did a wonderful job writing those, so they gave him the job of doing it.

Nat plays a role in the podcast – he’s the scientist Lloyd – so he was there virtually every day of recording, whether he was recording Lloyd’s lines or listening on the headphones. He was involved in every stage of writing and revision of the script. That made me feel a little bad because in every script you spot mistakes and make revisions but I knew that every time I tweaked something that was going to send off seismic waves through his novel.

I also gave him my blessing, as far as Tor was comfortable with, to go his own way with the novel. He would stick to the broad strokes of the story but if he wanted to go down some interesting avenues of his own, to me that seemed like a value add. For those who listen to the podcast and read the novel, it means they don’t have the identical experience twice – the novel should play with a few interesting variations and see what inventions he might bring to certain corners of the story.

He wrote it alongside the scripts – when I turned in a chapter, he was on the cc: list and he would write a chapter based on that and then do his revisions based on mine and the notes he got from Tor.

It’s very rare that you are able to get feedback from someone who is living so deeply within a script that you write. Every so often he would email and say he was struggling with a chapter because he didn’t fully understand my intention with this, that or the other thing. I’d then have to write back and say it wasn’t intentional – he’d just spotted a massive plothole that I now had to fix. It was like having a massively obsessed editor working alongside me the whole time.

He’s done it as a first person, Dak addressing Matt. It maintains most of the dialogue from the podcast, and expands some stuff within the prose. Her narration addresses Mat throughout, and it’s not the exact same feeling as the podcast. I think he wanted to follow the same dialogue that I wrote but not necessarily the same internal monologue.

Ashlie Atkinson (Dak)

How much did the podcast change from the initial pitch you made to Tor?

I’d say the biggest change was initially that I very much thought of it as a story with two main characters.

I was thinking of any number of noir stories about a couple that shouldn’t be together but who want to be together to pull off the perfect crime. The more I studied those stories and the more I developed this story, the more it became clear to me that while those stories often have two leads – the film poster would have two names above it – one character was very much the POV character, and the other was the one you were wondering about, the figure of mystery.

It increasingly occurred to me that Dakota was my POV character; it’s essentially her story. Matt is a figure of mystery in the story, to the point where certain of Dak’s insecurities, self-esteem problems, and a lack of experience with romance lead her to begin to question this situation with Matt and wonder what his intentions are. Those doubts kind of creep into the story, poison the relationship, which is often something you’ll see in a noir story. In those cases, the lead is often a man and he wonders if the woman in the story is going to double-cross him; that’s a key trope and I wanted to play with that in an interesting way in this.

The biggest change came in the process of outlining the story, when I realised that I didn’t have two POV characters, I had one; that the story was going to hew very closely to Dak’s point of view; and that in the process of devising where the story would begin and end, I wanted to follow an emotional and intellectual arc in her mind. I knew I’d got to the end of the story when she reached a certain point of realisation rather than a specific plot point.

The other big difference I would say is when I originally pitched it I had been thinking of a story that would be structured along the lines of the previous podcast, Life After, which was a 10 episode SF story. I just thought this would be 10 episodes too. Tor was interested in a 16 episode story, and when they brought that up I initially baulked, because 16 episodes is way too much to keep up the suspense and the storyline.

The model they had was for longer than 10 and I realised I was baulking without having written an outline. When I sat down, I realised that the 10 episode idea was based vaguely on the notion of what would be involved in the heist and I’d given no thought to the getaway. Someone as smart as Dak, who had handled difficult operations in her past military career, would have given some thought to the getaway… and that suggested additional episodes that would be involved in setting up the getaway and then playing it out to see how much it was going to play out according to plan – or not!

That allowed me to add extra episodes without padding the story, because in a podcast that’s deadly: the competition is so fierce getting people to come back to your podcast next week. The explosion of fiction podcasts in the US is such that to get people to come back to your podcast next week they have to be really hooked on it and it I padded this story at all I would begin to lose people to other entertainments. If people don’t have a money investment in the story – like they would if they’d bought, say, a Big Finish set: if they didn’t like the first story, they’d still listen to the rest – it’s so easy for them to stop.

It’s the old model of the cliffhanger from the 1930s – but even that is just Scheherazade, and 1001 Nights. The only reason she survives is because the king had to know what happens next!

That’s exactly right. When you outline a story like this so much work has to go into the cliffhanger. You have to have a reason that they naturally arise every 25 minutes and they have to make you really want to come back, as well as a feeling of escalation that the cliffhangers are getting more and more dire as the story goes along.

Some of the episodes veer into character beats rather than plot beats – episode 5 where Dak and Matt realise they’re going to make the heist; and episode 8 where Dak is talking to her friend that she protected. It helps us understand the characters but doesn’t necessarily move the story forward. Was there any feedback from Tor about those very different sorts of episodes?

Neimah Djourabchi (Matt)

There you may be seeing elements of my playwriting past at one level.

One thing I found is that I need the audience to be very heavily invested in the characters once the peril arrives, so the particular trick with this story was what’s tricky in every noir story: getting the audience to buy the romance on which the whole thing turns.

Those stories are always built on something that’s very close to love at first sight and you have to believe in very short order that the hero will do all sorts of irrational things for the object of desire. In this particular story, I was trying to figure out how to marry that to a suspense framework – so I decided I could believe not necessarily love at first sight, but instant attraction and lust at first sight that would flower into love over the next several encounters. In order for all the peril to land properly I needed the audience to be properly invested in at least Dak’s feelings, in what she wants, and hoping she gets it. I wanted to develop the relationships along those lines so people cared about her a great deal and suddenly when the danger starts striking that people feel like they know her as a friend so they’re really worried and want to come back to find out what happens to her.

The episode you’re talking about where she goes to meet her friend Lisa Fang in Washington, I saw two opportunities there: to take the next step and use that sequence to reveal what her getaway plan is, and what a big step her getaway plan is, and also to learn a little something about her past and the world around her. The reach of the company she works for is one that has national implications and it touches people who aren’t even in Dak’s daily life.

Ideally – this isn’t even possible, God knows, with scripts – it’s always great if a scene can serve at least two purposes. Sometimes you can only get one, but I love it when you can achieve two things and the perfect thing is when you can deepen character investment and raise peril at the same time. You can’t always get it – that’s the gold standard when you can.

What were the biggest challenges for you in creating this?

I’ve only been writing miniseries for a few years now – I transitioned from writing plays to writing these audio miniseries – and a huge part of the challenge comes at the outline stage. It’s not that writing the scripts isn’t difficult; it is of course very difficult; but a huge part happens at the outline.

Knowing you’re going to release something where one episode is coming out every week you have to make sure listeners get a full plate of entertainment every episode. There needs to be a bit of peril, a bit of strong emotional storytelling, a bit of world expanding. You need to make sure that every episode is not just the whole story cut up into 14 identical size pieces but each is a little storylet of its own and that listeners feel as if they’ve been sated. They might really want next week to come – I hope people do feel that way – but also I don’t want them to feel I’ve just parcelled out the next 25 minutes. You want them to think, “Each 25 minutes is crafted so I had a full artistic experience each week – I learned some more about the characters, I went on a bit more of a suspense ride, I got a bit more of the worldbuilding and that I got a good cliffhanger to whet my appetite for next week.”

The outlining stage is absolutely crucial to achieving this, and there’s the feeling of having got over a massive hump when that part is completed because I know after that it’s the still-difficult-but-a-bit-less difficult part of filling it out as scripts.

Some writers tell me that they can start a script without knowing how it’s going to end and every writer’s process is different but I would be lost in the woods without knowing where I was going.

Beyond that, since I was a hands-on producer for this, it was learning how to serve as an effective rewriter on site during the recording process and then to be a rewriter during the editing process.

During recording I’d be on headphones and I would spot lines or a sequence I didn’t like and figure out how to do quick rewrites. That’s a real skill – you have to do it fast in a way that doesn’t completely throw the actors off what they’re doing and build off the work they’re doing because you only have them for a certain number of hours and you’ve got to get the recording done.

Then there’s the skill of learning how to fix script problems once everything has been recorded when you can only work with the material you’ve recorded. We did a few minor retakes but by and large, if there’s a bit that’s not working, you have to restructure using only what exists, that you’re locked into. Figuring out how to rearrange and move around the bits you’ve already got was one of the biggest challenges I took on as a writer in this process because I didn’t have that hands on involvement in post-production with the previous audio dramas I have done.

 

In part 2 of this interview coming soon, Mac talks about his work on Torchwood: Aliens Among Us.

Steal the Stars can be downloaded from multiple platforms – for more details, click here. 

Read our review of episodes 1-5 here