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.
Visit my Web site about writing science fiction, Inventing Reality.
(c) 2008 Rob Bignell
Tags:
believability, conventions, novum, setting, suspension of disbelief
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