Inventing Reality: A Guide to Writing Science Fiction
Is science fiction dead?
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. But to the next generation, it’s all fresh and seen through a new lens of experience. That science fiction remains intriguing to so many youth is a sign that the genre’s messages are still relevant.
Williamson went on to note in his interview that, “We’ll always need to look out for the impacts and consequences of new technologies. That’s what science fiction does. New writers will keep on coming to carry it on.”
Will you be one of those writers?
You Do ItList 10 new scientific ideas or mysteries that you could write a story about. You might start by scouring the popular science magazines at your local bookstore. Or go online to science-oriented Web sites, such as New Scientist or Science Daily, to find those ideas.