Inventing Reality: A Guide to Writing Science Fiction
What is science fiction?
“By ‘scientification’ I mean the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Edgar Allen Poe type of story – a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.”
– Hugo Gernsback, “Amazing stories”, April 1926
Now that you've decided to write science fiction, you face a big question: How exactly do you know if you're writing science fiction? It's a diverse genre, so giving a definition that is all-encompassing is no easy task.
At its core, science fiction is a literature of “What if?” The writer imagines a setting - a possible future, an alternate history, an altered past - that is based on an extrapolation of science as we know it today. In doing so, science fiction evokes a sense of wonder among its readers or changes our views by showing us the universe in an unexpected way. It's where "science meets literature."
Consider "Star Trek: The Original Series". It poses questions such as, "What if space travel between the stars were possible?", "What if a man could be split into his 'good' and 'evil' halves?"; "What if an alternative universe existed in which the Roman Empire never fell?" In this sense, science fiction is thought model in which author and reader explores our world via "other worlds".
Sometimes the genre is referred to as “speculative fiction”, but this is more inclusive term that includes fantasy, science fiction’s older sister. In addition, among some of the genre’s devotees, “sci-fi”, “SF” and “science fiction” all have varying definitions, often disparaging of a certain type of story.
Click here for some famous quotations about what is science fiction.
You Do It
Create a list of “what if” questions that could be the kernels of future stories. One way to do this is to randomly pick a fiction book then opening to any page into its middle, start reading just the first sentences at the top of each page. For example, in opening a collection of Frederic Brown’s short stories, I read the line “He found the Cole Observatory in a state resembling a madhouse.” Now begin thinking of this line as a “what if” question: What if something occurred that would send an observatory into a frenzy. What if the astronomers spotted an asteroid on collision course with Earth? What if they spotted an alien spacecraft orbiting Jupiter? What if they noticed a nearby star no longer was there?