Confessions of an Accidental Sci-Fi Author

I’ve dreamed of being an author since I was ten years old—but I never expected to write sci-fi. If you had told me, five years ago, that my first published book would be a story about alien tattoo artists travelling through space on a fleet of generation ships... well, I probably would have laughed in your face. But since I seem to have stumbled into the role of sci-fi author—my debut novel Markmaker releases in October from Chrism Press—it seems fitting to look back and remember how I managed such an unlikely feat.

It wasn’t that I disliked science fiction; actually, I enjoyed it very much. Star Wars and Jules Verne were staples of my childhood. Astronomy and real-life space exploration fascinated me as well. There was something thrilling about all the danger and beauty out there in the void. But when it came to my own writing, I was never brave enough to venture into space. As much as I loved the genre, the thought of inventing a fully fledged, technologically advanced science fiction world always intimidated me. I think I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to make it realistic. Instead, I preferred the simpler settings of fantasy worlds. Talking animals, epic battles, and heroic quests featured often in my early attempts at fiction. Magic, after all, was easier to explain than technology.

Fast forward several years to my sophomore year of college. I was still determined to become a novelist, but after four intense semesters studying the liberal arts, I was in a serious creative slump. Academics had left me no time or mental energy for fiction writing. I also felt weary of fantasy tropes—I’d been writing in that genre for years, and I wanted something new. But I didn’t know how to do much else.

Then came the fateful evening that I sat in on my friend Donan’s role-playing session.

Many of my friends at school were involved in role-playing games. Somehow, though, the concept had never particularly appealed to me. It mostly seemed to involve rolling dice, adding up stats, and inventing over-the-top combat situations—which, frankly, I found a little boring. RPGs were for nerds, and while I was definitely a nerd in some sense, I wasn’t that kind of nerd.

But one Friday evening, I decided to join my friend group while they played their weekly session of Donan’s game: a sci-fi/fantasy adventure entitled Watchpoint. And the longer I watched, the more I found myself drawn in. Although I didn’t know anything about the setting or the characters, something about them intrigued me. This wasn’t “just dice” at all. There were character motivations, and unique factions, and tantalizing glimmers of a much larger world behind them. I was impressed by the way Donan, the gamemaster, used narration, dialogue, and atmospheric music to immerse everyone in the story. By the end of the session, I felt faintly jealous that I wasn’t a part of this game, after all.

Over the next several months, I started sitting in on Watchpoint sessions more and more often. I became invested in the zany, lovable characters and fascinated by the extensive world lore. After two years of academics, I realized, I was starved for plain old adventure stories. Eventually, I couldn’t stand it any longer: I wanted in. I created a character and joined Donan’s intrepid band of Watchmen.

The game continued for two more years—and those RPG sessions, sometimes serious, sometimes hilarious, and always rich with camaraderie, remain some of my most beloved college memories. During that time, I also started writing again. I loved this world so much that I couldn’t help but tell my own stories within it. 

It was my first foray into science fiction. I wrote about spaceships and aliens and spies and gunfights and all the classic tropes of military sci-fi. And I found I was having a roaring good time. It helped, of course, that I had a universe ready-made for me. Instead of agonizing over the worldbuilding, I could focus on characters arcs and emotion and motivation—the things I had always loved most about storytelling. But the setting was fresh and dramatic and gave me opportunities to experiment with writing styles that I’d never tried before. It felt incredibly freeing. I hadn’t had so much fun in ages.

Eventually, graduation arrived, the Watchpoint campaign ended, and our role-playing group parted ways. But some of us stayed in touch, continuing to share snippets of stories and lore. One day, Donan sent me a list of the ceremonial tattoos used by the Noxxiin, one of the main alien races in his universe. I pored over it, enthralled. For the Noxxiin, tattoos were not primarily decorative—instead they represented major life events, recording everything from ancestry to accomplishments to crimes. Wearing a false mark was not just illegal; it was seen as a sin, an offense against the truth and the ancestors.

Questions began bubbling up in my writer’s brain. What would it be like to live in such a culture? What role would the tattoo artists—the markmakers—play, and what kinds of laws would they enforce? What if there were criminal artists, mercenaries who would forge false marks? And what would motivate an artist to commit a crime against the truth?

The story possibilities were too tantalizing to ignore. The day after I read Donan’s list, I sat down with a notebook to dive into this strange alien world. I didn’t know much about my protagonist yet, so I decided to let him speak for himself. And from the very first lines, he did: My name is Mariikel. I am a son of Clan Serix. I am a markmaker, and a traitor to markmakers.

Once Mariikel started talking to me, I found, to my delight, that he wouldn’t be quiet. Over the next four months, his story poured out onto the page as I scribbled with a creative fire I hadn’t felt in years. Mariikel was an artist with an excruciating secret. By day, he worked in a prestigious tattoo studio for the honorable markmaker’s guild. By night, he visited the Underbelly—the bowels of the Noxxiin generation ship—to give illegal marks to outcasts and slaves. But he wasn’t doing it for money; what could the exiles give him, after all? No, something stronger drove this young artist to risk his life and reputation: a compassionate heart for those in suffering, and a tortured conscience that compelled him to subvert the order he’d sworn to protect.

This was a story. By the end of the first draft, I knew I had something special. Yet I found I was still shy to explain my project to others. People tend to give you strange looks when you say you’re writing a book about alien tattoo artists. This tale, as much as I loved it, was clearly a space fantasy adventure. It couldn’t really be “serious literature”. Could it?

But as I slowly began sharing my draft with friends, family, and fellow writers, I found that most people reacted with enthusiasm. They were taking it seriously. They connected with the characters and felt the moral dilemmas as I had meant them to be felt. They genuinely loved it.

Seeing those reactions gave me the confidence to lean into the gravity of my own work—to accept that my alien adventure story could be a legitimate exploration of truth and falsehood, law and justice, sin and redemption. As I worked through the revision process—and, later, the editorial process with the team at Chrism Press—I realized that I had created exactly the kind of science fiction I loved to see for myself. All my favorite sci-fi stories—Ender’s Game, Interstellar, The Mandalorian (just to name a few)—were, at their heart, about people faced with difficult moral decisions. They showed people struggling to follow their consciences in worlds rife with suffering and injustice. That was what made them compelling. The stories could be set on other planets, the technology could be wildly advanced, but in the end, the characters remained beautifully familiar in all their fear and pain and joy.

That, I think, is what I love most about writing sci-fi. Like its sister genre, fantasy, science fiction serves as a stage on which the human condition is thrown into sharp relief. Speculations about society or technology can serve as reflections on the unchanging nature of humanity: a race created with inherent dignity, fallen into degradation, but still seeking redemption and restoration. These stories appeal to us deeply, especially in our secular, tech-saturated modern world. We want to know that our lives, like those of our favorite characters, are still rich with meaning.

I freely admit that I am a writer of “soft sci-fi”: I can’t explain how most of the tech in my book works, so I don’t even try. But I still enjoy it. I’ve found myself strangely at home among my alien tattoo artists and their ancient ships and their quest for truth in the flesh. I think I’ll stay and keep scribbling their stories for a while yet.

-Mary Woods’ debut novel, Markmaker, will be available October 3, 2022 from Chrism Press, www.chrismpress.com