Inventing Reality: A Guide to Writing Science Fiction

Arguably the most important “character” in your story isn’t its hero but the narrator – the person who tells the tale.

The narrator can be the story’s hero, as in Hannu Rajaniemi’s “Deux ex Homine:

As gods go, I wasn’t one of the holier-than-thou, dying for your sins variety. I was a full-blown transhumanist deity with a liquid metal body, an external brain, clouds of self-replicating utility fog to do my bidding and a recursively self-improving AI slaved to my volition. I could do anything I wanted. I wasn’t Jesus , I was Superman: an evil Bizarro Superman.

On occasion, the narrator is another character in the story, who observes what occurs to the hero, as in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, in which Watson tells how Holmes solves the mystery:

[Holmes] was a man of habits... and I had become one of them... a comrade... upon whose nerve he could place some reliance... a whetstone for his mind. I stimulated him... If I irritated him by a certain methodical slowness in my mentality, that irritation served only to make his own flame-like intuitions and impressions flash up the more vividly and swiftly. Such was my humble role in our alliance.

Often the narrator isn’t even a character in the story but the author’s persona, as in Stephen Baxter’s “Lakes of Light”:

The door of Bicansa’s car opened. A creature climbed our cautiously. In a bright orange pressure suit, its body was low-slung, supported by four limbs as thick as tree trunks. Even through the suit Pala could make out immense bones at hips and shoulders, and massive joints along the spine. It lifted its head and looked into the car. Through a thick visor Pala could make out a face – thick-jawed, flattened, but a human face nonetheless. The creature nodded once. Then it turned and, moving heavily, carefully, made its way toward the colony and its lake of light.

Who you select as the story’s narrator is vital. The narrator holds a unique position among readers, possessing an air of authority. Because of this, the narrator shapes the reader’s attitudes. Choose the wrong narrator, and you risk the reader interpreting events in a way you don’t intend.

Another note of caution: be careful of not imposing yourself too much if the narrator is your persona. If you directly insert too many of your views rather than let the characters’ action demonstrate your view, the story will be weakened.

You Do It
Write a 100-word scene in which the hero must rescue the Earth from alien invasion. Narrate the story from the hero’s point of view. Now rewrite the piece so it’s told either from the point of view of another character in the story who observes the hero or from the author’s perspective. Which of the two pieces is better? Why? How does selection of the narrator influence the piece’s effectiveness?