I’ve been going back through my old work — editing it, republishing it, which in the industry we call recycling and in every other industry we call fraud.And while I’m in there scraping the barnacles off my own prose, I notice something. Character development. It grabbed me by the collar.So now I’ve got a decision to make. Do I sit on this revelation like a dragon on a pile of gold? Or do I hand it over — free, no charge, no upsell — to the small, strange congregation that actually subscribed to these e-mails?You people. The ones who gave a stranger your address voluntarily. The ones who, maybe twice a year, show up out of the void to say “hello” and then vanish again like you’re in witness protection.Yeah. I’m telling you. You earned it just by sticking around.

Grab your favorite beverage and settle in. Today we’re talking about the beating heart of every great science fiction story: the characters. You can have the most dazzling wormhole physics since Interstellar, but if your protagonist is about as deep as a puddle on a space station floor, readers will bail faster than a crew abandoning a breached hull.I’ve spent years writing across genres—sci-fi, psychological thrillers, even a little book collecting the world’s finest examples of Stupid Shit—and I can tell you this: character is king. The spaceships are just expensive furniture.

Start With the Human, Not the Hardware

Here’s a trap I see constantly: writers fall in love with their world first. They spend six months designing the economy of a gas giant’s floating cities, then slap a cardboard cutout named “Captain Blaze Starlance” into the middle of it.Flip the order. Ask yourself:

• What does this person want? (Not the plot—them, personally.)
• What do they fear?
• What lie do they believe about themselves?

That last one is pure gold, and it’s where my psychology studies have paid off more than any writing manual ever did. Characters driven by self-deception are magnetic. A navigator who believes she doesn’t deserve her post. An engineer who’s convinced the AI loves him back. The lie creates tension; the story tests the lie.

Psychology Is Your Secret Weapon

You don’t need a degree to do this well (though I’m earning one, and it’s shamelessly useful), but you do need empathy and observation. A few tricks:

• Give them a wound, not just a skill. Anyone can be “the best pilot in the fleet.” Far more interesting: the best pilot in the fleet who freezes whenever someone screams over comms—because of what happened on Titan.
• Let their coping mechanisms show. People under stress joke, withdraw, control, or compulsively fix things. Your characters should too. A character who deflects everything with humor is a joy to write—I blame my lifelong love of George Carlin for that particular habit. Carlin understood that comedy and rage are roommates. Give your comic-relief character reasons to be funny. Dark ones.
• Contradiction is realism. Real people are walking contradictions. The pacifist medic who’s terrifyingly good with a scalpel. The hardened soldier who can’t kill a spider. As an old Air Force hand, I can confirm: the toughest people I served with were often the gentlest off-duty, and vice versa.

Ground the Future in the Past

Here’s something my history and literature studies taught me: people don’t change as much as technology does. A sailor on a 17th-century man-o’-war and a crewman on a generation ship both know what it means to be trapped in a metal hull with the same 200 people for years, thousands of miles from home.When you build a character for the far future, anchor them to recognizable human patterns:

• Hierarchy and its discontents
• Faith, superstition, and how they mutate in isolation
• Love and jealousy in confined spaces
• The old guard versus the new generation

Your starship captain can be Horatio Nelson with a neural implant. Your colony squabbles can echo the Dust Bowl. History is free characterization research. Use it shamelessly.

The Physics of Personality

Now, because I’m the kind of person who reads electronics manuals for fun and keeps a ham radio rig humming in the garage, let me say this: let your characters interact believably with your technology.If your story has FTL travel, artificial gravity, or mind-uploading, don’t just treat tech as magic wallpaper. Ask:

• Who maintains it, and what does that daily grind look like?
• Who’s terrified of it? Who’s obsessed with it?
• What does it cost—not in credits, but in human terms?

An old radio operator character who taps out messages in Morse because she doesn’t trust the quantum comm array? That’s a character with texture, history, and a worldview. Technology reveals character when characters have relationships with it.

Dialogue: The Carlin Test

Read your dialogue out loud. If it sounds like two exposition-dispensers exchanging schematics, revise. Great dialogue does at least one of these things:

1. Reveals character (what they say vs. what they mean)
2. Creates friction (people rarely want the same thing in the same moment)
3. Sounds like a person, not a manual

In comedy, Carlin’s genius was precision—he knew exactly which word hit hardest. Sci-fi dialogue often drowns in invented jargon. My rule: use one invented term where you’re tempted to use five, and make sure the emotional current underneath the words is always flowing. People arguing about reactor settings are usually really arguing about trust.

The Grandkid Test (Yes, Really)

Here’s a litmus test I use, inspired by the toughest critic I know with the highest standards—someone young enough to see right through nonsense: would a smart kid find this character boring?

Kids forgive complexity but never forgive dullness. They don’t need simplified characters; they need honest ones. Write people who want things badly, who fail, who surprise you. If your grandmother and your granddaughter would both find your protagonist interesting, you’ve done something right.

A Quick Checklist Before You Launch

Before your character boards the ship, make sure you can answer:

• What do they want? (External goal)
• What do they need? (Internal truth they must learn—or refuse to)
• What’s their lie? (The self-deception driving them)
• What’s their wound? (The past that shaped them)
• What’s their contradiction? (The trait that makes them human)
• How do they relate to the tech? (Love, fear, mastery, resentment)

If you can answer all six, congratulations—you’ve built a person, not a plot device.

Final Transmission

Science fiction’s greatest trick is that it’s never really about the future. It’s about us, reflected in funhouse mirrors of chrome and starlight. Your characters are the mirror. Polish them until they gleam with humanity, and readers will follow them anywhere—even across the event horizon.Now go write something. And if your first draft is full of stupid mistakes, don’t worry—I know a good title for the collection.

What’s the trickiest character you’ve ever tried to write? Drop a comment below—let’s compare notes.

About the cover… I just published this: Eight Minutes Late

In April 1947, an eclipse of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede came eight minutes late. Eclipses don’t run late. Something had crossed the solar system.

Three miles south of Roswell, New Mexico, farmer and amateur astronomer Bill Taylor catches it first, on glass photographic plates. By summer, a quiet man from Washington and a truckload of Army men have taken every plate but the one Bill hid in the pantry. In July, debris comes down near Corona, and Bill is one of the few civilians who touches it. His wife, Ruth, will say she never could feel the warmth.

The government buries what it finds: a metal that matches nothing on the periodic table, that straightens when it’s bent and closes when it’s cut, and a larger device no one can open. A list of names goes into a file. A man in a gray suit keeps checking on the Taylor family for decades.

Nearly eighty years later, a gravitational-wave detector in California records a wave too large to measure. Earthquakes strike four continents. Long-silent volcanoes wake. A tsunami reaches Baja California. Ten stories under Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the sealed vault is opened again, and an illness that has haunted it since 1948 begins to kill.

Lisa Taylor, Bill’s granddaughter, is a biochemist at the University of New Mexico who studies how bacteria survive by switching genes off and waiting. When a presidential liaison brings her underground, she carries a ticking tin from the family farm and the question no one has answered in nearly eighty years: why some people live and others don’t. The answer is in the blood. It may be in hers.

Spanning three generations, from a New Mexico farm in 1947 to Huntsville, Alabama, and far past the Moon, Eight Minutes Late is a grounded, emotional first-contact thriller about a family, a secret, and something that has been waiting a very long time.
For readers of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary, Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain, and Carl Sagan’s Contact.

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