Inventing Reality Editing Service Blog

There’s a cardinal rule for all science fiction authors to follow: Limit your story to one novum. This better allows you to maximize reader interest in it while helping maintain a sense of believability about the new world you’ve created. The more you ask writers to suspend their disbelief by accepting new concepts/ideas that stretch their imagination, their greater the risk you run that you’ll lose them.

Of course, asking many long-time SF readers to accept more than one novum isn’t necessarily bad – some readers expect it or they believe you’re not fully describing the universe you’ve created. But often writers borrow and reuse novums from other stories. After all, how many times have we read science fiction stories involving faster than light travel, ray guns, multiple star systems of varying kinds (trinaries, binaries, etc.), transporter-like devices and holodecks? Many of these concepts aren’t truly novums at all but simply science fiction conventions that make your universe seem like a truly interstellar society.

Tags: believability, conventions, novum, setting, suspension of disbelief

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Most science fiction readers don’t think like an academician when reading a story set in space or the near future. They don’t say “Aha! There’s the novum!” when you mention the “time sled”. They do have very real expectations, however, about how you use the “time sled” in your story. Every literary genre follows various conventions and rules, and in science fiction how the author handles the novum is among them, even if the reader can’t list what they may be.

As a writer, however, you need to be cognitive of what those rules are:

n The reader should be able to understand what a novum can and cannot do – Warp drive allows a spaceship to travel faster than the speed of light. Simply using it as a vague propulsion system without explaining its actual purpose (FTL travel) can leave the reader wondering if warp drive really is up to the task of taking characters between star systems and serve as a distraction to your story.

n The novum must be plausible – It must be based on the laws of science as we now know them. For example, with continued research and a few breakthroughs, widespread use of nanotechnology is a very real possibility for our civilization. Humanoid invaders from the planet Venus, given our understanding of that world as a dry and superhot, isn’t plausible.

n The novum must be fascinating – A room in which holographic images are so real that they can deceive a person into thinking he’s actually in the location projected is interesting as it opens a number of dramatic possibilities and possibilities for philosophical introspection. After all, what if the faux worlds created on the holodeck are far more intriguing to people than the real world? What would happen?

n Borrowed novums should be improved upon - It’s okay to borrow novums used in other science fiction works. But the novum should be treated in a new way or the story runs the risk of lacking originality. Indeed, one of the ways our genre grows and remains vibrant is that authors further explore and play off other authors’ ideas and novums. So if a phaser -like weapon is the centerpiece of your story, have it do more than incinerate objects or knock a person unconscious. Have it burn a person from the inside for hours so that the victim dies painfully, creating an ethical dilemma for one of your merciful main character.

Tags: conventions, ftl, novum, setting

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If you’re thinking of writing science fiction, you first need to answer an important question: Is science fiction dead? After all, if the genre is moribund, why bother to keep writing the same clichéd story over and over?

A number of recognized science fiction writers, long-time fans and critics say the genre has long since passed its prime. Brian Aldiss has argued that science fiction is redundant because of technological development and scientific advancement. “The truth is that we are at least living in an SF scenario,” he wrote. Others claim that technology is advancing so rapidly that science fiction can’t keep up. Unlike the 1930s or even the 1970s, envisioning what comes next is nearly impossible. In addition, many in the publishing industry say science fiction is now about writing novelizations based on television shows and motion pictures (particularly “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” at the expense of original ideas. Ultimately, critics often state that science fiction’s themes and conventions , such as space flight and ecological disaster, have been repeated so often that they are stale.

I beg to differ.

Each of the above points certainly has some validity when discussing what’s wrong with science fiction today. But to conclude that science fiction is dead because of it is like assuming the crew is doomed when our rocketship crashes on an alien world in the opening paragraphs of our novel.  

There’s some truth to the notion that scientific advancement is more specialized than ever before, and so we often don’t see the larger picture of how a small advancement greatly affects a society until after the fact. But this argument is merely shows an ignorance of science. Quantum computers and nanotechnology may be almost here, and that may negate any prediction power SF stories would have about those fields. But what will come after quantum computing and nanotechnology? What happens when humanity decides quantum computing isn’t fast or vast enough and adapts some other form computing? What happens when humans move beyond nanotechnology and begin to manipulate matter at the subatomic level by moving about quarks and leptons to create atoms?

That the number of “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” volumes take a large chunk of any bookstore’s science fiction section is undeniable. But hopefully those series will introduce people to science fiction (a love of “Star Trek” certainly did for me when as a third-grader, forced to chose from a reading list, I selected the closest thing to my beloved TV series – a comic book version of H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds”; within two years I’d read several of Well’s novels, scoured every science fiction short story collection for children and got hooked on Asimov and Frederick Brown). In addition, there are plenty of outlets, via the Web, for science fiction storytelling if print publishers have failed the genre.

That some of science fiction’s themes and conventions have been repeated to death certainly is true, especially for older generations of readers.... [More]

Tags: conventions, getting started writing, science, theme

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