In which I recount the origins of Raether’s Enzyme.
When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth
Way back in the 20th Century, I lived in Silicon Valley and did the sort of work you’d expect. I enjoyed hanging out with my friend M, who rented a real Eichler house in Mountain View. M is a talented hardware engineer with a strong entrepreneurial streak. We amused ourselves by dreaming up new devices of dubious utility aimed at people with more money than good sense. M’s residual ethics kept us from making millions by actually bringing the gadgets to market. One day, he took a break from suggesting a new Scam-u-tron to declare that we should make a movie.
Understanding the limited resources we had to work with, I spun-up the premise of our low-budget masterpiece. The Bay Area of that era was a hotbed for various self-improvement “technologies”. The Forum and NLP were in their heyday. The whole scene had a cultish vibe to it. In our story, a new mind technology hits town. Using Eureka, you can organize your thoughts and acquire knowledge in a way that reliably builds towards those elusive flashes of insight. Come to our seminar, we’ll show you how. The New Cognition™ may actually work. It may work too well for some people, who slip into a “hypercognitive coma” and emerge…changed.
It wasn’t what M was looking for, so I let it drop. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if it really was an alien invasion via SETI or how the story should end.
The Dawn a New Century
Ten years later, I was taking a break from the open bit mines. Before I found a new corporate master, I wanted to try my hand at writing. In all those years, I hadn’t found a way around issues troubling Eureka and renewed efforts were unproductive. It bothered me that I was going back to such old story ideas. Couldn’t I come up with something fresh?
Yes, yes, I could. What I salvaged from Eureka was the format. A novel’s worth of writing was too daunting and I wasn’t clever enough to tackle my themes in a short story. Screenplays are lean, short, and at least comparable to a novel’s narrative payload once the artists and technicians of the film industry work their magic.
My first screenplay was an effects-heavy epic that combined hard science fiction with superheroes. The budget for The Atlantean would have been astronomical. At the time, superhero movies were not mandatory. Even today, no one would greenlight a spec script for a non-existent franchise. I figured that much out after completing the script. There was another problem. The audience for sci-fi superhero stories skews heavily adolescent male. Was there a way to explore the themes of The Atlantean in a genre that didn’t narrowcast? Could it be done on a small budget? Could I tell a superhero story that didn’t require super-sized willing suspension of disbelief?
Raether’s Enzyme was the answer to those questions. It was a techno-thriller with an appealing female protagonist. Its Pacific Northwest setting meant the production could leverage the economies of Canada’s film industry. Raether’s enzyme, the mysterious biomaterial, was a startling world-changer that didn’t dump a bucket of luminous iridescent goo over Science’s head. It felt almost-real, like something that could make headlines in tomorrow’s news.
Two of my early readers testified that they sat down planning to read a few pages and were drawn through the whole script. Where this happened to each of them was…amusing. It gave me hope that I was onto something worth pursuing.
An invaluable resource during this writing process was Dave Trottier’s The Screenwriter’s Bible. Mr. Trottier also offers a script evaluation service. His critique was insightful and constructive. I balked when he suggested that I end the story earlier. He identified a specific point to close it off. During our phone consultation, he convinced me to cut the dénouement. The script and the novel are better as a result.
I submitted the improved script for the second season of Project Greenlight. Greenlight was a fascinating exercise in game theory. Contestants scored each other’s scripts and optionally provided feedback. Higher-scoring scripts advanced to subsequent selection rounds. Players had a choice of strategies. They could be fair and honest or they could work to knock strong players out of the competition to improve their own chances. Raether’s scores were split between people who really liked it, and said so in the comments, and those who silently gave it a minimum score. It sank without a trace.
Further exploration of the “breaking into the industry” process culminated at a big screenwriting conference in Los Angeles. There were so many aspiring writers in one place. We were all so sure that our story was the one The Industry was hungry to tell. The need for high hurdles and brutal gatekeepers became clear. As much as I loved my story, I couldn’t bring myself to move down there and run the gauntlet. I shelved my script and returned to the world of software engineering.
A Novel Idea
Long years of work for my benevolent overlords afforded me another opportunity to step away from gainful employment. It was time to give storytelling another try and see how much value I could create outside of the corporate matrix. Technological disruption created paths around the gatekeepers. Andy Weir and Hugh Howey provided proof that it was possible to connect compelling stories with their audiences. It was time to write my first novel.
I still loved the story and characters of the Raether’s Enzyme script. Its themes were still important. Advances in technology over the intervening years impacted the plot but (sadly) did not render the core narrative anachronistic. I had a strong foundation that had been workshopped and reviewed. The script was like a super-outline. All I needed to do was adapt it.
How hard could that be? Well, that’s a story for another post.