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One common understanding of what makes a story “science fiction” is it involves the intrusion of some new invention, discovery or alien being into a world not unlike our own. How this intrusion modifies the “real world” forms the thrust of the story. After all, what is Martians existed? Of course, they’d leave their dying world and invade ours. Or what if we could travel faster than the speed of light? Of course, we’d travel to strange new worlds.

The invention, discovery or alien being that intrudes upon our world sometimes is referred to as a “novum”, which literally means “new thing”. SF author Brian Stableford coined the term.

The idea of a novum being key to science fiction existed long before Stableford established the term, however. In 1972, Darko Suvin after examining several decades of science fiction defined it as "a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment.” If the “author’s empirical environment” is literally the “real world”, then the introduction of something new is needed to create an alternative “imaginative framework.”

Tags: genre, novum, science fiction, setting

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Space opera is characterized by a number of conventions:

n Good guys - The two-fisted hero, the brilliant but eccentric scientist and his beautiful daughter all inhabit this genre.

n Bad guys - Our good guys invariably must confront invaders from space, space pirates, interplanetary smugglers, space dictator and his henchmen or other evil-doers.

n Dazzling new invention - To resolve conflict, good guys usually have to devise a dazzling new invention and then fight the bad guy in hand-to-hand or ship-to-ship battle with the dazzling new invention playing a key role in the victory.

n Heaps of non-explained technology - Space opera isn’t about science. It’s about good guys defeating bad guys and the neat gizmos they use to do it. How the gizmos work is irrelevant.

Given these characteristics, space opera isn’t concerned about internal conflicts among the characters, or at least none of worth. As there are no incompatible desires and aims to drive the story, the story typically becomes no more than mindless, pointless violence. It’s the kind of story we love as kids – and really only love as adults either because we fall in a nostalgic mood or because we haven’t quite yet grown up.

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(c) 2008 Rob Bignell

Tags: genre, plot, space opera, space western

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Genre stories often have expected endings, called “ritual endings”. Mysteries, for example, include the main character reciting how he made the connections that that led him to solve the crime. “Star Trek” episodes typically end with the exchange of a joke that relates to the story’s theme. Part of the fun of such stories is seeing how the characters reach this ritual ending.

Tags: conclusion, denouement, genre, plot, resolution, ritual ending

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Go to the science fiction section of your local bookstore or tune into SciFi on cable and you’re likely to find novels and movies that aren’t exactly science fiction. Or at least it’s not what you think of as science fiction, though it’s quite similar.

That’s because some of the selections fit into the fantasy or horror genres. Because many science fiction readers enjoy these similar and related genres, they’re often grouped together for convenience and marketing purposes.

But you want to be a hard core science fiction writer. So how do you know when you’ve crossed the gray line into the fantasy or horror genres?

Science fiction novelist Orson Card Scott offers a good explanation: He suggests that if the story is set in a universe with the same rules as ours, it’s science fiction; if it doesn’t follow our rules, it’s not. “Fantasy is about what couldn’t be,” he writes.

Certainly the genre’s milieus are different. A milieu is the story’s “environment,” the totality in which the story’s action unfolds. Science fiction’s milieu is based on science. Fantasy is based on magic while horror is based on the supernatural and paranormal.

Because of this, science fiction stories obey the natural laws of our universe (even if something is beyond our current technology). Fantasy, however, establishes a new set of natural laws - that is, the author creates a set of certain rules that the magic obeys. Horror, meanwhile, inserts a set of supernatural laws into our universe.

Given this, science fiction stories contain biologically possible creatures. Fantasy stories are populated with mythical creatures and horror tales feature monsters that terrorize us.

In addition, science fiction tends to be more technical than its sister genres. Fantasy in turn is more mythical and fairy tale while horror is more lurid, relying on gothic elements.

Of course, there’s a lot of crossover, one of the causes of confusion among the three genres. “Aliens” essentially is a horror story in a science fiction setting (a spaceship in Earth’s future). The “X-Files” TV show regularly switched between monster of the week (horror) and alien invasion episodes (science fiction). “Frankenstein” the novel is more science fiction than horror (though the genre hadn’t even been invented at the time) while the “Frankenstein” Hollywood movies are more horror than science fiction.

To some extent, the gothic novel is one of the parents of science fiction, a combination of horror and adventure stories - with the gothic element replaced by something more scientific in origin, such as a robot or extraterrestrial. Science fiction author Brian Aldiss argued in “Billion Year Spree” that his favored genre generally derived its conventions from the gothic novel.

Tags: fantasy, genre, horror, science fiction

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