How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (2 page)

Wells was much more serious and logical than Verne in his extrapolation of the possible results of scientific advances. And yet their stories sometimes had quite similar structures. For instance, while
Around the World in Eighty Days
dealt entirely with the sights and wonders of Verne’s contemporary world, its ending absolutely hinges on knowledge of a scientific fact-that by traveling toward the east, the hero gained a day when he crossed the International Date Line. This is very much the same sort of structural game Wells played when he had the invaders from Mars in
The War
of
the Worlds
defeated by the common cold. Great events are changed by the most humble of facts-and yet when the reader reaches the surprise resolution, his faith in the order of the universe is restored. Humble little facts will save us in the end.

A. Merritt’s
Face in the Abyss
and H. Rider Haggard’s
She
had even less in common with Wells than Verne did. Both these novels have a traveler find himself in a land long forgotten by modern man. In
She,
a magnificent woman has found a way to live forever, at the cost of the blood of her subjects; in
The Face in the Abyss,
lizard men descended from the dinosaurs keep a race of humans in thrall for their obscene sports and pleasures. There is more of magic than science in both of these books, yet

There is a strong overlap of the readers who loved Wells, those who loved Verne, and those who loved Merritt and Haggard.

Indeed, when Hugo Gernsback founded the first magazine devoted entirely to science fiction,
Amazing Stories,
back in the late twenties, he announced that he wanted to publish scientific romances like those of H.G. Wells; yet it is fair to say that, instead of the serious, rigorous scientific extrapolation found in Wells’s work, Gernsback’s magazine-and the others that soon imitated it-published stories that had far more of Verne’s love of machines or of Merritt’s and Haggard’s romps into strange and dangerous places than of Wells’s more serious treatment of science and the future. It wasn’t until the mid-thirties, when John W. Campbell became editor of
Astounding
(now
Analog,
that Wellsian science fiction came to the fore in the American magazines.

Rigorous extrapolation, a gosh-wow love of gadgets, and mystical adventures in strange and mysterious places; every major stream in speculative fiction today can be traced back to authors who were writing before the publishing categories existed. From among the readers in the twenties and thirties who loved any or all of these authors arose the first generation of “science fiction writers,” who knew themselves to be continuing in a trail that had been blazed by giants. Gernsback’s publishing category of science fiction was a recognition of a community that already existed; once it was named, once it became self-conscious, that community blossomed and cast many seeds, giving rise to each new generation that repeats, revises, or reinvents the same literary tradition.

The boundaries that once were fluid now are much more firm, because the publishing category reinforces the identity of the community of readers and writers. Hilton felt no qualms about writing a lost-land novel,
Lost Horizon;
it troubled no one that it didn’t belong in the same category as, say, his novel
Good-bye, Mr. Chips.
And so many readers responded to the book that the name of the lost land, Shangri-la, passed into the common language.

Today, though, an author who wrote a fantasy like
Lost Horizon
would immediately be placed into the fantasy category, and if he then wrote a
Good-bye, Mr. Chips,
American publishers would be at a loss as to where to place it. How could you call it fantasy? Yet if you publish it out of the fantasy category, the readers who lilted the author’s earlier books won’t ever find it, and the readers who
do
browse the “Fiction” category won’t ever have heard of this author and will probably pass the novel by. As a

result there will be enormous pressure on the author to write “more books like that Shangri-la book.”

(Indeed, he will be pressed to write a whole series, which will be promoted as “The Shangri-la Trilogy” until a fourth book is published, then as “The Shangri-la Saga” until the author is dead. It happened to Frank Herbert with his Dune books, and despite her best efforts it is happening to Anne McCaffrey with her dragon books. Only a few, like Marion Zimmer Bradley, manage to break out of such channels and take a sizeable audience with them.

Yet my experience as a reader is that the category boundaries mean very little. There have been months, even years of my life when all I really wanted to read was science fiction; but I felt no shame or guilt, no enormous mental stretch when at other times I read historicals or mysteries, classics, poetry, or contemporary best sellers. At present my pleasure reading is history and biography, but that will certainly change again. And even at the height of a science fiction reading binge, nothing can stop me from devouring the latest John Hersey or William Goldman or Robert Parker novel.

The result is that today, while readers are very free, passing easily from one community to another, the publishing categories clamp down like a vise on the authors themselves. You must keep this in mind as you begin to publish. Do you wish to be forever known as a science fiction or fantasy writer?

Some writers whose careers have been largely based on science fiction writing have never been categorized that way. Kurt Vonnegut, for instance, stoutly resisted any claim that what he wrote was science fiction-though there is no definition of science fiction that does not include his novels within the genre
except
that the words science fiction have never been printed on his books.

John Hersey, as another example, has written such science fiction masterpieces as
White Lotus, The Child Buyer,
and
My Petition for More Space;
yet because he wrote other kinds of fiction first, he has never been locked into one category. (“Couldn’t you, like, put some aliens into this book, Mr. Hersey? I’m not sure your audience will know what to make of this historical set in China of all places.”)

Vonnegut and Hersey were never within the science fiction ghetto. A few rare writers like Bradbury and LeGuin have transcended the boundaries without compromising the elements of fantasy within their work.

But most of us find that the better we do as speculative fiction writers, the less interested publishers are in our non-sf, non-fantasy writing.

Boundary 3: What SF Writers Write Is SF

One surprising result of the ghettoizing of speculative fiction, however, is that writers have enormous freedom within its walls. It’s as if, having once confined us within our cage, the keepers of the zoo of literature don’t much care what we do as long as we stay behind bars.

What we’ve done is make the categories of science fiction and fantasy larger, freer, and more inclusive than any other genre of contemporary literature. We have room for everybody, and we are extraordinarily open to genuine experimentation.

Admittedly,
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
regularly receives letters that ask, “In what sense is this story by Kim Stanley Robinson or Karen joy Fowler a science fiction or fantasy story? Why isn’t it appearing in
Atlantic
where it belongs?” Some readers complain; indeed, some fairly howl at what writers do under the rubric of sf and fantasy.

Yet the reason these stories don’t appear in
Atlantic
or
Harper’s
or
The New Yorker is
that even though they aren’t really science fiction or fantasy in the publishing-category sense or the community sense (there are neither rivets nor trees, neither science nor magic, and they certainly aren’t what readers were consciously looking for) their stories are nevertheless strange, in ways that editors outside the field of sf and fantasy find quite threatening.

There is no particular reason why Karen joy Fowler’s “Tonto at 40” (published as “The Faithful Companion at 40” to avoid a lawsuit from the
Lone Ranger
people, who have no sense of fun) shouldn’t have appeared in a literary magazine. But the story was too experimental, too odd in ways that felt dangerous or confusing to editors who are used to seeing only the “experiments” that follow the latest trend. Only within speculative fiction was there room for Fowler’s work.

It has happened again and again, until it seems that there must be more room inside the ghetto walls than outside them. Even writers like Bruce Sterling and Lew Shiner, who have complained about the boneheadedness and unoriginality of most speculative fiction, discover that, despite the science fiction community’s enormous appetite for stories with very bad

thinking and worse writing, it remains the community most willing to sample something new.

Sample-not necessarily embrace. It is not experimental but traditional work that wins Hugo and Nebula awards within the field. What matters is that truly unfamiliar and untraditional work is published
at all,
first in the magazines, and, once the work has become somewhat familiar there, eventually in books.

In the long run, then, whatever is published within the field of science fiction and fantasy is science fiction and fantasy, and if it doesn’t resemble what science fiction and fantasy were twenty years ago or even five years ago, some readers and writers will howl, but others will hear the new voice and see the new vision with delight.

Once, frustrated with the plethora of meaningless definitions of science fiction, Damon Knight said, “Science fiction is what I point at when I say science fiction.” That may sound like a decision not to define the field at all-but it is, in fact, the only completely accurate definition.

The operative word in Damon Knight’s definition is 1. That is, if Damon Knight, a writer, critic, and editor of known credentials, says that a work is science fiction, then it is. When it comes to known science fiction writers, that power is almost absolute. Because I’ve been around long enough, if I write a book and decide to call it fantasy or science fiction, then it is; even if others argue with me, it will still be counted as part of my science fiction/fantasy oeuvre. If you doubt me, read Gene Wolfe’s novel
Free Live Free.
He swears it’s science fiction. There are even shreds of evidence within the novel that it might be so. That’s enough for him, and so it is enough for us.

Editors and critics have the power to dub other people’s work as well. If the editor at
Asimov’s, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Analog, Aboriginal SF,
or
Omni
buys and publishes a story as fantasy or science fiction, then that writer’s identity as an author of fantasy or science fiction is fairly launched.

Book publishers have similar authority. Patricia Geary was more than a little surprised to wake up one day and discover that her novels, including the brilliant
Strange Toys,
had been published by Bantam in the science fiction/fantasy category. The thought that she was writing within a “category” never entered her mind. But she quickly learned that whether she sought the label or not, the speculative fiction audience was open to her stories in a way that her intended “literary” audience was not.

Like the stable in C. S. Lewis’s last Narnia book,
The Last Battle,
the science fiction ghetto is much larger on the inside than it is on the outside. You think as you enter it that you’ll be cramped and confined; but I can tell you that for many of you it is only inside the sf community that you will find room enough to write all that you want to write and still find an audience for it.

Still, all this talk of freedom is pretty irrelevant to you. Why? Because unless you are already established as a science fiction or fantasy writer, you do
not
have the power to decide unilaterally that your work belongs in the category. You must persuade at least one editor that your novel or story is science fiction or fantasy-and with rare exceptions, editors have a finely discriminating eye.

You see, while the marketing department at a publishing house may think that a spaceship on the cover is enough to make a book sci-fi, the editorial department knows better. Your story has to
feel
like science fiction or fantasy to the editor or it won’t get published, and then you won’t have access to the great freedom that speculative fiction writers get
after
they’ve become established in the field.

So you need some sort of definition of speculative fiction that lets you know how to satisfy enough of the expectations of the genre so that editors will agree that your work belongs in the category. Let’s take for granted at this point that your skills and innate genius make your stories publishable. You still need to make sure your story warrants being published
as science fiction or fantasy.