How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (11 page)

What we should learn from the bad writing so common in hard-sf circles today is not that hard sf can’t be written well-we have Asimov and Clarke, Niven and Clement, Sheffield and Forward to prove otherwise-but rather that there is a tremendous opportunity in the area of hard science fiction for talented, skilled storytellers who have also mastered

enough of the hard sciences to speak to this audience. The audience does not insist on bad writing, merely on good science; if they are offered good science
and
good writing, they almost invariably provide such an author with a very long, secure, and well-paid career.

On the other hand, many of us who write “soft” (anthropological or sociological), literary, or adventure science fiction have made the mistake of shunning the precise sciences in our storytelling. Most of us slip the whole issue by setting all our stories on planets “very much like Earth” or on worlds that have already been fully invented by other writers. Just like the weakest of the hard-sf writers, we concentrate only on the things that interest us-social structures, elegant prose, or grand romantic adventures - and completely ignore what doesn’t. To the extent that we who are now the mainstream of science fiction ignore the hard sciences in our world creation, we are as guilty of shallowness as the hard-sf writers who pay no heed to social systems, characters, and plots.

There are some writers who have done it all at once. Larry Niven, for instance, is known as one of the great hard-sf writers-but I, for one, am of the opinion that he is a leading writer in our field because he is one of the best and clearest
storytellers
we’ve ever had. He works in the hard sciences to create his worlds and generate his ideas-but what makes him one of our great writers is the quality of the tales that he tells within those worlds.

Perhaps the most notable recent example of fiction that does it all is Brian Aldiss’s brilliant and ambitious Helliconia trilogy:
Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer,
and
Helliconia Winter.
Conceived and executed as a Great Work, the entire story takes place on a planet that orbits two binary stars. Not only is there a fairly normal annual cycle of seasons, but also there is a thousand-year cycle of superseasons. As the planet draws near to the larger star, the overall climate becomes almost unbearably hot; as it recedes, warmed only by the smaller, cooler star, the planet becomes so cold that it almost completely freezes over. All life on the planet, including human life and society, has adapted to the millennial cycle.

As literary, anthropological, and romantic science fiction the trilogy is unexceptionable; it is also excellent hard science fiction. Most of this is due to Aldiss’s genius and to his unflagging integrity as a storyteller; part, though, is surely due to the fact that he is British, not American, and Britain has largely escaped the ghettoizing process that has long afflicted American letters. Not only is science fiction itself not so firmly subdivided,

nor sf so thoroughly split from fantasy, but also the whole speculative fiction field is viewed by the British literary mainstream as a legitimate area for a “real” writer to venture into. After all, it was Britain that produced H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell, honoring them as great British writers, not just as great British writers of science fiction. Thus Aldiss-like many other British writers-has remained immune to the insularity that so often makes American writers of speculative fiction use only a fraction of the tools available to storytellers.

So, if you have a bent toward hard science fiction, I urge you to broaden your scope and expect all your stories to be good fiction as well as good science. And even if you have little interest in hard science fiction, I urge you to broaden your scope and explore the possibilities that the hard sciences offer to the storyteller. And even if you know nothing about the hard sciences-even if you think you want only to write fantasy-I suggest that you get your first overview of the sciences by reading as much fiction by the great hard-sf writers of the forties, fifties, and sixties as you possibly can. You’ll come out marvelously entertained -with a good survey of what the cutting edge of science was at the time each story was written.

I firmly believe that a good storyteller’s education never ends, because to tell stories perfectly you have to know everything about everything. Naturally, none of us actually achieves such complete knowledge-but we should live as if we were trying to do so. You can’t afford to close off any area of inquiry. Writing the same book, I recently called upon ideas I learned from reading Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson,
The Path to Power;
the detailed reference work on medieval village society,
The Lost Country Life;
Rafael Sabatini’s romance
Captain Blood;
Clifford Geertz’s
Interpretation of Cultures;
and Plato’s Symposium. Who knows how much better my novel might have been had I only read a half dozen other books, or examined a dozen other subjects that I’m still hopelessly ignorant of?

In creating the strange milieu in which your story takes place, you must first understand as well as you possibly can the familiar milieu in which your own life is taking place. Until you have examined and comprehended the world around you, you can’t possibly create a complex and believable imaginary world.

Indeed, one of the greatest values of speculative fiction is that creating a strange imaginary world is often the best way to help readers see the real world through fresh eyes and notice things that would otherwise remain

unnoticed. Speculative fiction is not an escape from the real world, and writing it is not a way to have a literary career without having to research anything! Speculative fiction instead provides a lens through which to view the real world better than it could ever be seen with the natural eye. In other words: You can’t know too much.

3. Story Construction

You have your world, so deep and rich that you can hardly wait to get started with the story itself. The trouble is that you don’t know yet what’s supposed to happen in the story. In fact, you don’t even know whom the story’s about.

Sometimes this isn’t the problem-sometimes it’s the character you think of first, and the world creation comes after. Sometimes you already know the whole story.

Or do you? The process of world creation should have changed many aspects of your main character, just as character development changes the world. At some point you began to wonder why your main character ever came to this place. (That’s where many of the best ideas come fromsitting around wondering about why things are the way they are in your fictional world.) As you thought of answers to that question, you decided that she has a family, including a younger sister that she’s always been jealous of, and the reason she first left her home world for this colony was to get away from her sister. Now her sister has arrived in the colony-as the administrator in charge of the very program your character works in!

Your basic story outline may well remain the same: Your main character, Jia, discovers that the desert scavengers on this planet, called scabs, are actually sentient (literally “sensible” or “feeling”) creatures deserving protection. Yet at the same time, her team of xenobiologists has succeeded in developing a biobomb that will wipe out the scabs to save the colony’s crops nothing in your world creation has caused you to change this basic story.

But now everything is complicated by the fact that it’s Jia’s younger sister, Wu Li, who will make the final decision about deploying the plague that will exterminate the scabs. The story is now pulling the reader along

in two ways at once: The reader cares about saving an endangered people, the scabs; and the reader sympathizes with Jia’s family problems, and how hard it will be for her to swallow her pride.

In your original idea, you figured that Jia’s team leader was the kind of martinet who went by the book and refused to consider the idea that the scabs were sentient. It was time to deploy, so the team leader was going to deploy. This sort of stock villain is a serviceable device for moving a plot along, but there’s nothing there to interest the reader. Now that the team leader is Wu Li, if you stick with that original plan and make Wu Li act out the part of an unmitigated jerk, you’re going to be shortcircuiting your own creative process. Because Wu Li and Jia are sisters with a long history between them, your story can-must-be transformed.

For instance: Jia “knows” that Wu Li will never listen to her, because in all their lives together Wu Li has deliberately rejected everything Jia asked her to do. So instead of reporting her findings to Wu Li, Jia can only think to stop the biobomb by sabotaging the project. When Jia is caught, she triumphantly tells her sister that the scabs are now safe; whereupon her sister makes it clear that if she had only known the scabs were sentient, she would have halted the project immediately. In fact, Wu Li was already concerned that the scabs had not been adequately studied before the previous team leader had made the decision to develop a biobomb against them. If Jia had only talked to her, they could have worked together to meet the colony’s need to save their crops without wiping out the scabs.

Now, though, Jia has gone off on her own and sabotaged the project, and despite her excellent motives, there’s no way she can be trusted again. Her career is over-if Wu Li reports her. Jia, still rejoicing at the fact that Wu Li believes her about the scabs’ sentience, assumes that Wu Li will smooth over the whole incident and they can work together from now on. But Wu Li, weeping bitterly, refuses-she is not going to sacrifice her own integrity, even to protect her sister. The incident will be reported accurately; Jia’s career is over.

This sets you up for a powerful scene in which Jia, angry and bitter at what she sees as her sister’s disloyalty to her, nevertheless goes out into the desert with Wu Li and shows her everything that she’s discovered, including introducing her to the one scab with whom she has established a kind of communication. She’s doing it for the scabs’ sake, she tells herself-but the readers understand that it is really a kind of reconciliation with her sister. Jia now realizes that she can trust Wu Li implicitly, that

Wu Li’s integrity is so great that she can be trusted to treat the scabs properly.

Perhaps you’ll write the story so that Jia knows that the blame is her own, that if only she had trusted her sister before, her own career would not be over. Or perhaps you’ll leave her blind to her own failings, so that even as she tells Wu Li all she knows, Jia hates her and will never forgive her. This is perhaps the most painful ending, because your readers will be torn, wishing Wu Li had been more merciful to her sister, but also understanding that Jia is wrong and the ultimate fault is with her.

But you must notice that the most powerful aspects of this story were not in your original idea. In that version the team leader was a cliche villain, the bureaucrat who won’t listen to a new idea. In that version, the sabotage of the project was the end of the story. What good would all your world creation do if now you stick with that original story plan? Your reader would probably feel quite dissatisfied at the end; the alert ones would be wondering why you bothered to rnalce the team leader her sister, since it made no difference in the plot.

You have to be willing to change
anything
during the creation phase; only that way can you make the story be true to yourself. There’s nothing sacred about your original idea-it was just a starting point. The final story may end up being completely different. In fact, in the story we’vc been talking about, you may even discover that Jia isn’t really the main character anymore. It’s Wu Li who has the most painful decision to make-whether to report her sister’s sabotage and ruin her career, or save her sister but perhaps endanger other projects because of her sister’s proven instability. So instead of telling the story from Jia’s point of view, as you always planned, now you realize you must tell it from Wu Li’s viewpoint.

The story is nothing like what you first thought it would be. But so what? It’s
better-richer, deeper,
truer-than that original idea. The idea did its work: It got you thinking. After that, if you feel bound to stick to it no matter what, that idea becomes a ball and chain that you drag with you through the whole process. Stick with it and you’ll get nowhere. Cut it loose and you can fly

So whether you think you already know your story or have no idea what should happen in your newly created world, you can still benefit from going through the following steps in working up the structure of your tale.

1. Whose Story Is This?

When you’re deciding whom the story is about, remember that the “hero,” the main character, and viewpoint character
don’t
all have to be the same person.

Most of us use the term
hero
as an informal synonym for “main character.” But in our day we often have an anti-hero as our main character /or protagonist), and it’s useful to keep a distinction in mind.

The
hero is
the character that the audience hopes will achieve his goals and desires-the character we’re rooting for. There’s a moral judgment involved here. We not only care what happens to him, we also
want him to win.

But the hero isn’t always the main character. Sometimes the most important character in a story, the one who makes everything happen, the one whose choices and struggles the story is
about, is
a slimeball, and we watch him in horrified fascination, hoping
somebody will
stop this guy. Sometimes we even sympathize with him, pitying him or even admiring some aspects of his character-but we still don’t want him to achieve his goal.

The best example of this is M. J. Engh’s masterpiece,
Arslan,
in which the title character is a conqueror whose atrocities at the beginning are only matched by his nihilistic plan for the world he now rules. He is a combination of Hitler and Genghis Khan. We want him to lose; yet we also understand and care about him, are fascinated by him, sometimes in awe of him. By the end of this novel-which I believe is one of the great works of literature in our time-we understand something about one of the great mysteries of modern life: why people loved and followed Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and others whose cruelty seemed boundless. In no way is Arslan the “hero,” but he is definitely the main character of the book.

Yet at the beginning of the book you don’t necessarily realize this, because the story is told from the point of view of the principal of the local high school. We are seeing events through his eyes as he witnesses Arslan’s initial atrocities and then comes to know the conqueror as his enemy. The relationship between the principal and Arslan is very important throughout the story, and we have great sympathy toward the principal, but when, a third of the way through the book, the viewpoint shifts to another character, we are ready. The principal was our eyes and ears, and for a time he

was the hero-the person we hoped would win-but he was never the person that the story was about.

By no means is it a rule, but it’s often a good idea, when your main character is an anti-hero, to have secondary characters who can function as the focus of your readers’ sympathy- in other words, heroes. They don’t have to occupy center stage, but they often provide a clarifying moral center. However, if the point of your story is that there
are
no heroes, then this advice doesn’t apply-assemble your cast of rakes and racketeers, sleazebags and slimeballs, wimps and wastrels, losers and liars, and have at it.

The Main Character

In choosing the main character for your story, there are a couple of questions you need to consider:

Who hurts the most? In the world you have invented, who suffers the most? Chances are that it is among the characters who are in pain that you will find your main character, partly because your readers’ sympathy will be drawn toward a suffering character, and partly because a character in pain is a character who wants things to change. He’s likely to
act.
Of course, a character who suffers a lot and then dies won’t be a productive main character unless your story is about his life after death. But your eye should be drawn toward pain. Stories about contented people are miserably dull.

Who has the power and freedom to act?
Your eye should also be drawn toward movement. Characters who are powerless aren’t likely to be doing anything terribly interesting. Your main character usually needs to be somebody active, somebody who can change things in the world, even if it’s a struggle.

Remember that you look for people with both the power
and
the freedom to act. Too often-particularly in medieval fantasy-writers think their story must be about rulers. Kings and queens, dukes and duchesses they can be extravagantly powerful, yes, but too often they aren’t free at all. If you understand the workings of power in human societies, you’ll know that the greatest freedom to act in unpredictable ways is usually found away from the centers of power.

Let me give you an example: the television and movie series
Star Trek.

The original series creator wanted characters with the power to make decisions, and centered on the captain and executive officer of a military starship. Unfortunately, however, as anyone who knows anything about the military will tell you, the commanders of ships and armies don’t have many interesting adventures. They’re almost always at headquarters, malting the big decisions and sending out the orders to the people who do the physically dangerous work.

In other words, the lives of commanders (and kings) are generally above the most interesting action. The really neat stuff is going to be happening to the people on the cutting edge -frontline troops, scouts, the people who get beamed down to the planet’s surface to find out what’s going on. It would be insane for the commander of a ship or any of the highest officers to leave their posts and do common reconnaissance. In any real starfleet there would be teams of trained explorers, diplomats, and scientists ready to venture forth at the commander’s orders. If
Star Trek
had been about one such team, the stories would have been inherently more plausibleand there would have been room for tension between the ship’s officers and the exploration teams, a rich vein of story possibilities that was virtually untapped.

Instead,
Star Trek
centered around the characters with the highest prestige who, in a realistic world, would have the least freedom. But since commanding officers who behaved like commanding officers would make for boring television, the writers simply allowed these characters to go exploring, constantly leaving their duties on the starship as they merrily went about getting kidnapped, lost, beaten up, or whatever the plot of the week required. Any captain of a ship or commander of an army who behaved like Captain Kirk would be stripped of command for life. But the series would not have worked otherwise.

At this point you might be saying to yourself, “I should be so lucky as to make mistakes like
Star Trek -I
could use a few bestsellers.” But the point I’m making is that
Star Trek
could not possibly have succeeded if the captain had actually behaved like a captain. Centering the series around a commanding officer was such a bad mistake that the show immediately corrected for the error by never, for one moment, having Kirk
behave
like a captain.