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 no arguing that many of the advances Aldiss and his contemporaries imagined have come to pass, but there are more technological advances to come - and hence more science fiction to write. There’s no lack of unexamined material or unanswered questions out there. As science fiction legend Jack Williamson – who was first published in 1928 - said in an interview when he was 94-years-old in 2006, “I see science as a sort of mystery story about the nature and meaning of the universe. … There’s a feeling that the story keeps unfolding, a new chapter every day.” 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....
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The kernel of any good science fiction story is a scientific fact that we know of today. A good writer grows his story by extrapolating from this fact. In the process, he probably should create an intriguing world that awes the reader in some way.
Consider H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds.” In the 1890s when he wrote the piece, many scientists believed Mars was capable of supporting life. They also believed (incorrectly we now know) that the father a planet was from the Sun, then the older it was. From this, Wells made an extrapolation: What if there really were Martians living on a dying world? What if they had to take drastic measures to ensure their survival? What if, because of Mars’ lower gravity and older age, the Martians had evolved differently than humans?
He answers all of those “what if” questions with his novel that pits invading Martians against Victorian England and the inhabitants of Earth. In doing so, he creates a sense of wonder by using real science – at least real science for his time.
That scientific extrapolation can create a sense of wonder or awe is a philosophical attitude in the science fiction genre. We’re not talking about wide-eyed naivety in storytelling, however; indeed, a danger is that you can get preachy about science and rationalism, especially at the story’s end. But science fiction readers like a sense of adventure, are intrigued by the exotic and love science with a dash of romanticism. Most of them expect that your story will do something “cool” with science.
Take T. Richard Williams’ recent short story “Mystic Canyon”, about an astronaut who discovers primitive multicellular life on Titan: Here in this eerie, dark place at the bottom of a lake on Titan, prehistoric lampreys scour along icy sand, taking in their remarkable cryobiotic nutrients - dancing, floating, paying a visit to Humpty, staring me in the eye - creature to creature from worlds a billion miles apart.
In 50 or so words, Williams expresses the wonder of science, of that joy in making a new discovery. It’s the kind of “cool” moment that keeps the story in the readers’ mind and inspires kids to become scientists or at least take an interest in the natural world.
You can take a variety of steps to create a sense of wonder in your stories:
n Ensure science is integral to your story - Don’t tack science onto a previously written story that was a western, a mystery or a romance. The whole reason for the central problem of your story must arise from an extrapolation in current science. For example, what if Martians invade the Earth?
n Use science and technology to help generate dramatic tension -The extrapolations you make from today’s science should create conflicts, not just ease people’s daily lives. After all, the transporter can split Captain Kirk into “good” and “evil” personas. The two must come into conflict with one another and those around them.
n Surprise us with the scientific advances’ effects - As Fredrik Pohl once wrote, “A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.” No one foresaw that in the 1920s when Henry Ford started rolling out Model Ts.
n Show how your characters react to the changes that arise from scientific advances - Cultural behavior shifts occur because of technology. Television, computers and cell phones all leave us more isolated by isolating us from direct, face-to-face personal conversation. Motor vehicles separate families by hundreds of miles because we are not...
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