How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (9 page)

3. The magic user does not have to cut off his own body part; he can cut off somebody else’s. Thus magicians keep herds of human beingssocial rejects, mental defectives, and so on-to harvest their limbs for power. In most places this practice would be illegal, of course, so that their victims would be concealed or masquerade as something else. (A good horror story using this magic system might be set in our contemporary world, as we discover people living among us who are secretly harvesting other people’s limbs.)

4. The magic user can only obtain power when someone else voluntarily removes a body part. Thus magic is only rarely used, perhaps only at times of great need. If a private person wishes to hire a spell done, he must provide not only payment to the wizard, but also a part of his body. And at a time of great public need, the hero is not the wizard,

but the the volunteer who gives up part of his body so the spell can be cast to save the town. (How about a psychological study of a pair of lovers, one a magician, the other a voluntary donor, as we come to understand why the one is willing to give up his or her body parts for the other’s use?)

5. When the magician casts a spell,
someone
loses part of his body, but he can’t predict who. It has to be someone known to him, however, someone connected to him in some way. And, while wizards all know this dark secret of their craft, they have never told anyone, so that nobody realizes that what causes limbs to wither up and fall off is really not a disease, but rather the wizard up the street or off there in the woods or up in the castle tower. (And here’s the obvious variation: What if some common but nasty disease in our world is really the work of secret magicians? That’s why certain diseases go in waves: twenty years ago it was bleeding ulcers; now it’s colon cancer. And the hero of our story is a wizard who is trying to stop the suffering he and others like him are causing.)

6. When a wizard casts a spell, body parts wither and fall off the person he loves the most. The love can’t be faked; if he loves himself most, it is himself who loses body parts. The greater the love, the greater the power-but also the greater the suffering of the wizard when he sees what has happened to the person he loves. This makes the most loving and compassionate people the ones with the most potential powerand yet they’re the ones least likely to use it. (Here’s a monstrous story idea: The child of loving parents who wakes up one morning without a limb and, seeing her devoted father getting paid, begins to suspect the connection between her maiming and his wealth.)

You get the idea. There are at least this many permutations possible with every other source of magic I’ve ever heard of. And the stories you tell, the world you create, will in many ways be dependent on the decisions you make about the rules of magic.

3. Invent the Past

Worlds don’t spring up out of nothing. However things are now, they used to be another way, and somehow they got from there to here.
Evolution

Whenever you invent an alien creature, you should invest a great deal of effort in determining why, in evolutionary terms, its unusual features would have developed. Not that you have to figure out the exact mechanism of evolution-we’re still arguing about that in the real world! -but you do have to think about why the alien’s unusual features would have survival value.

For instance, take some aliens that were developed in a thousand-ideas session at the World Science Fiction Convention in New Orleans in 1988. I always start the alien-building part of the session by asking, “How do these aliens differ from human beings?” I reject the obvious similes: “They’re like cats.” “They’re like dogs.” I insist on something truly strange.

This time someone said, “They don’t communicate by speaking.”

I immediately insisted that I didn’t want to deal with telepathy. “Find another way that they communicate.”

There were many good suggestions, but one that worked especially well was the idea that they lived in water and communicated by passing memories directly, in chemical form, from one alien’s body to another. In fact, the memory of a particular incident would replicate like the DNA of dividing cells, so that after they traded memories, each person would remember the incident as if it had happened to him.

Such a society would have no need of writing anythirig down, or of language at all-indeed, individual identity would be much less important to them than to us. And death would be almost meaningless. As long as you passed memories before you died, then everything you thought and experienced would continue to live on, so that even though you might cease to take part, everyone in the community would clearly remember having done everything you did!

Someone in the group objected that they would eventually overload, remembering everything that had ever happened to everybody who had ever lived. So we decided that there had to be a mechanism for forgettingbut not irretrievably. We imagined that they would have developed a way of encoding memories in solid form, building them into structures, perhaps even large edifices composed entirely of memory; and there would be many aliens whose sole job was to remember where memories were stored-librarians, in other words.

But why would such an ability evolve? We decided that this alien species

of underwater creatures was fairly weak-bodied and not too fast, with many large, quick predators that often killed them. The tribes that survived were those that learned to manipulate rocks and corals and build shelters, or those that learned to consciously reshape their bodies into other forms-or, perhaps, those that learned to join their bodies together into large, intimidating shapes. Each tribe had a different strategy, but it could never be passed from tribe to tribe. Now, though, let’s say that the subspecies that has learned to join their bodies into large forms also passes chemicals, quite accidently, from body to body while joined. And some of those chemicals are memories.

Now let’s say that the rush of new memories is like a drug, a rapturous experience. Aliens begin to seek it frequently, not just waiting until they’re threatened. (Perhaps the pleasure comes from the fact that the joining behavior was always triggered by fear and immediately followed by safety and relief.) There is no particular advantage to random joining of memories-these creatures aren’t all
that
bright yet-except that young aliens whose parents conjoin with them and pass memories to them gain a competitive advantage over other youngsters who remain ignorant of their parents’ memories.

The result is that memory-passing is strongly reinforced from generation to generation, and in true Lamarckian fashion, learned behaviors become part of the heritage of each succeeding generation. In addition, since this developed among the shape-formers, these underwater creatures would continue the habit of joining into strange shapes.

It was a terrific basis for an alien society, with a lot of story possibilities. Then, only a week later, I found myself in Gaffney, South Carolina, talking with Jim Cameron about the novel version of his movie
The Abyss. His
script was brilliant, but an area he had neglected-and properly so-was the aliens. There wasn’t time or means in the film to explain them. But in the book version that I was writing, they
had
to be explained.

So I wrote an exploratory chapter (which never showed up in the book) from the point of view of the individual creature who became the original alien colonizer of Earth. I found that everything we had come up with in that thousand-ideas session in New Orleans was wonderfully useful. It was an evolutionary skeleton on which I could hang all the strange behavior of the aliens in the film.

In fact, those are probably the best aliens I’ve ever devised for any of my science fiction, and one of the reasons they were better than usual is

cause I had two unrelated idea sources: the idea session and the movie script, which provided all kinds of anomalous behavior that had to be explained. Out of the tension between the filmscript and the evolutionary path traced in that idea session there grew what seemed to me to be a truly complex, believable, and interesting alien society.

You may think that you want the aliens in your story to remain strange and mysterious, but I assure you that you won’t accomplish this by skipping the step of developing their evolutionary history. If you don’t know why they are what they are, why they do what they do, then the result in your story will be mere vagueness. But if you know exactly why they do what they do, you’ll develop their behavior with far more precision and detail; you’ll come up with many surprising twists and turns, with genuine strangeness. You’ll lead your readers to the brink of understanding why the aliens do what they do; the mystery comes from the fact that the reader is never quite sure. But you are sure.

Read enough science fiction, and you can almost always tell the difference between the writer who has done the development and the writer who’s faking it.

History.
Even when you’re working entirely with human societies, a vital part of world creation is knowing the history of the communities in the story. You can’t just put a demagogic preacher in your town, leading a mob of self-righteous church people into a book-burning frenzy; the result is invariably caricature. Instead, take the time to figure out why these people are following the preacher, why they trust him and believe in him.

Don’t settle for the cheap answer, either-“Because they’re a bunch of dumb bigots” doesn’t make for honest fiction. They may be acting like a mob in the climax of your story, but until that time they were all individuals, all different from each other, following that preacher for their own reasons.

Part of the reason is that he’s charismatic. But what does “charisma” mean? Think of some specific events that must have happened. For instance, the reason Mick and Janna would follow Reverend Bucky Fay to hell and back is because when their baby was sick, he came into their home and looked into the baby’s eyes and then cupped the baby’s head in his hands and said, “I see you’re only a few weeks gone from the presence of Jesus, and he sent you into this world to do a great work. Satan has filled your body with disease, but you are such a magnificent glorious spirit that you have the power to fight it off within you-if you want to. But I

can’t ask you to heal yourself, no sir. You can sense all the evil in the world, and you’re so good and pure that I don’t blame you if you deckle not to live here a moment longer. But I beg you to stay. We need you.”

The baby died a few days later, but instead of blaming Bucky Fay for not healing the infant, Mick and Janna felt sure that their baby was so good that it simply couldn’t bear to live in this wicked world. They tell the story to others, and because they speak with such fervency and belief, others believe them, too. Half their identity is based on the fact that God once chose them to be parents of one of his most perfect children; if they ever doubted Bucky Fay’s spiritual insights, it would be like desecrating their lost baby’s grave.

Now, maybe you won’t even use an incident like that in the story. But you know it, and because it’s there in the history of that town, the people in that mob are no longer strangers to you, no longer puppets to make go through the actions you want them to perform. They’ve come alive, they have souls - and your story will be richer and more truthful because of it.

Biography.
You’ll also know more about Reverend Bucky Fay, too. You’ll have pieces of his biography. And when it comes to fiction, biography isn’t just a matter of filling out a resume-when was he born, how did he do in school, what did he get his degree in, is he married or single or divorced? What matters with fiction is
why.

Why did Bucky Fay ever go into the ministry? Was he once a believer? When he does things like that scene with Mick’s and Janna’s baby, does he believe, or halfbelieve, the things he’s saying? Or does he think of these people as unbelievably dumb suckers? Or is he consumed with guilt? Or has he come to believe that he has the power to “see” things about other people, simply because everybody else believes what he says? Maybe this is how prophecy felt to Moses, he says to himself. Maybe he just kind of made stuff up, only whatever came to mind turned out to be true because God was in him.

The more you know about what has happened in a character’s past
and why,
the more complex and interesting the world of your story will be. The people, the societies, all
will
seem real.

4. Language

How does each community within your story speak? If you have people from more than one nation, they might well speak different languages; if they’re from different worlds, they certainly will.

Perhaps there’s a lingua franca, a trading language like Pidgin in the Pacific, or Swahili in East Africa, or English in India, that few speak as their native tongue, but everyone speaks well enough to communicate with each other. Some writers go so far as to actually
create the
various languages-look at Tolkien’s
Lord of the
Rings-but you don’t really need to do that.

In fact, you probably shouldn’t. For one thing, you’re likely to embarrass yourself. Not many of us are gifted and deeply educated linguists like Tolkien, whose fictional languages sound so real in part because they’re all based, however loosely, on real human languages.