Inventing Reality: A Guide to Writing Science Fiction
Time
Stories don’t just happen somewhere, they happen at some time – the far future, the 23rd century, a decade or two from now, the distant past, the present. This aspect of the story – the “time” when the story occurs, is an element of setting (the other is place).
Deciding the “time” of a story is important because it will help ensure if the story is believable. After all, you’re making an extrapolation from known science. When that extrapolation occurs should fit into some timeline that seems reasonable to readers in the present.
Too many “Outer Limits” and “Twilight Zone” episodes, for example, feature deep space exploration or the construction of AI androids only a few years into the future. Despite being interesting stories, they are too near to our own time to be believable. In the “Star Trek” universe, many see the transporter as an unlikely device, even in a society where faster than light travel is possible. One critic several years ago said it was like finding an X-ray machine aboard a boat on the Nile in ancient Egypt.
Whether or not your scientific extrapolations become fact once the story’s time actually comes to past in the real world really doesn’t matter. For example, in Greg Bear’s 1985 book “Eon”, optical telescopes are being built on the Moon’s farside and six orbital transfer flights are planned for a two-month period – in a novel set that starts on Christmas Eve 2000. In 1985, the days before the Challenger explosion, such a future was very possible. Space shuttles were being launched weeks apart, hundreds of millions were being spent annually on space defense programs and President Reagan had called for a space station to be built. To a reader in 1985, this future just 15 years away seemed quite possible.
You Do It
Look back at one of the pieces you’ve written for these exercises. Now change the “time” of the story – if the piece is set 100 years into the future, rewrite it so it occurs just 10 years from now. How does this affect the piece’s believability?