Inventing Reality: A Guide to Writing Science Fiction

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.