“The Fermi is the fastest ship, and the deadliest weapon in the universe. We only need it to be one of those things.”
In this sequel to Fermi’s Progress, the Fermi continues its voyage across the galaxy, its faster-than-light engine vaporising every planet it encounters, forces unknown steering it towards inhabited worlds.
But now there is hope of a way out. An ancient, lost alien device that might negate the deadly side effects of the Alcubierre drive. As they voyage through dangers including a war-torn forest moon, a vampiric dinner party, and the terrors of their own imagination, will the Fermi’s crew find that escape?
Or will they be forced to confront the destruction that lies in Fermi’s Wake?
1. Everything is made up
The spaceship Fermi is a worldbuilding engine (despite looking a lot like the precise opposite of that). It was designed so I could introduce new planets quickly and show you their weirdest and most alien bits. If you have questions about those planets like “But how would that economy function long-term?” or “Is there even enough biomass in that ecosystem to support a predator of that size?”, I definitely have the answers to those questions. Except oh, the planet just exploded, I guess now we’ll never know.
But I still put a lot of thought into how each planet works, trying to avoid the baked-in assumptions of a (Western, 21st century) human society. Some things, like gender, are easy to blow apart and rebuild differently. But other times, you will start picking apart systems of measurement to try and find an alien alternative for a single line of dialogue, and discover once again that every unit we have can ultimately be traced back to an estimate of the length of a Mesopotamian farmer’s forearm.
A drum I love to bang is that good sci-fi shows us how much of what we assume to be universal (scientific, economic, moral) law is actually a convenient local assumption, but it’s still dizzying when you probe even a little bit into just how much that is true (So often it’s easier to just have your universal translator do the systems of measurement as well).
2. Sequels aren’t as much of a timesaver as you think
Fermi’s Progress was four novellas, but also very much one novel. So Fermi’s Wake really felt like my first go at writing a sequel. And writing sequels is great! You get to skip so much of the hard bit of starting a new book – establishing the characters, and the setting, and the rules of the story. Except I quickly found out you don’t really.
The beginning of a story is the beginning of a story, even if everyone in it had lives before it started (and you hope they did). You still have to do all the same jobs – you might know everyone’s name already, but you have to establish where they are now, whether that was two minutes or ten years from the last page of the previous book.
While we like to pretend characters are independent people running around inside our heads (and I do), they also exist to carry out a function, and that function is not going to be the same from story to story. So in a lot of ways, a sequel still feels like starting from scratch.
3. A bad draft can be more useful than a good one
When writing a Fermi novel, I write each novella, then go over each one in turn, then do another edit on the whole sequence before the final check and polish. Sometimes that first or second edit is easy. With the first story in Fermi’s Wake, I was rewriting the occasional sentence or paragraph as I went, occasionally tweaking the order of things for pacing, but that first draft was very similar in shape to the one you’ll buy.
The second novella, For the Trees, was completely different. Put bluntly, it sucked. It wasn’t just that it was bad – it was exactly wrong in every respect. The wrong characters were experiencing the wrong events, in the wrong places, with the wrong information, in the wrong order. People were in the midst of action that meant nothing to them, while the people who would have felt it most were sitting around waiting for plot to happen.
That first draft was so precisely wrong, it served almost as a perfect negative image of the good draft. That redraft amounted to almost a complete rewrite, and it was kind of exhilarating. The final result might be my favourite story in Fermi’s Wake – but it wouldn’t have been possible without that truly terrible first version.
4. Grim events don’t make for grim people
When I started on Fermi’s Progress, tone was a challenge. I had, intentionally, picked about the grimmest scenario you can imagine. A band of people who have lost everyone they ever cared about, and who know that everyone they ever meet is also doomed to die because of them. It’s a comedy.
It’s a comedy because I am physically incapable of Not Writing the Jokes, but I still wanted those deaths to matter, not just to be a glib punchline for each story.
But also, I’m here to write cool space adventures on alien planets. I didn’t want my characters spending their time sitting in dark rooms lost in their thousand-yard stares.
Fortunately, then the Covid-19 pandemic happened (Okay, I’m not entirely above a glib punchline). It was not the first globally bad thing to happen while writing these stories – I started writing Fermi in the twelve months before Brexit and Trump 1.0 kicked off – but it helped crystalise something for Fermi’s Wake that I think until then had only been subconsciously feeding into Fermi’s Progress.
Which is that when everything else is miserable, people don’t just stop. We make jokes. We get incredibly angry out of all proportion about things apparently unrelated to the source of the misery. We find little silly sources of happiness. And sometimes, on a really, really good day, we find ways to make things a tiny bit better.
The Fermi stories are about people trapped in and forced to maintain a machine that makes death, and Fermi’s Wake is when it really clicked for me why I relate to that so much.
5. Don’t hold back the good bits
The list of influences that went into the Fermi melting pot is a long one, and most of them are writ large in the book itself, but a big one is The Twilight Zone. I am an absolute sucker for a Rod Serling twist, that moment where you realise the two kissing faces you’ve been staring at have been a candle stick this whole time. There are definitely a few such twists scattered around Fermi’s Wake, but if you chase that high too far, you can easily trip into the “mystery box storytelling” trope, endlessly promising a good Rod Serling twist but never delivering the payoff. What makes The Twilight Zone such a presence today isn’t the twists, it’s that those twists capped off intriguing situations and characters we enjoyed spending time with.
I ended Fermi’s Progress with a few questions dangling over the Fermi and her crew, and in Fermi’s Wake you’ll get some of those answers much quicker than I think you’re expecting. If the promise of a future answer is how you keep your audience around, you’re not focusing enough on what’s happening on the page right now. And for me, the really interesting stuff is what changes once you have the answer, and what the characters do with it.
Chris Farnell had his first novel published in 2006. Since then, he has written jokes for the TARDIS, the employee handbook for Star Trek Lower Decks’ U.S.S Cerritos, as well as chronicling the misadventures of the deadly starship, Fermi.
Adventures and supplemental material he has written can be found in the worlds of Spire: The City Must Fall, Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, and Star Trek Adventures. And between all that he writes for the likes of Den of Geek, Rock Paper Shotgun, Film Stories, and The Radio Times. He lives in Norwich.
Chris Farnell: Website | Bluesky
Fermi’s Wake: Landing Page | Season Pass | Amazon
