Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (648 page)

Writing, as the fellow said, is a lonely business.

One of the common ways that writers through the ages have worked to offset this loneliness is by banding together in workshops and critique groups. In taverns and in coffeehouses, at school and at home, writers have always gathered together to hone their craft and, not incidentally, reassure themselves that they are not alone. At the same time, young writers have always sought out the more established members of the field in the hopes of learning wisdom from them, or at least a few handy tricks of the trade.

Finding a good workshop or critique group, however, can be a difficult and confusing process, especially for a new writer who doesn’t yet know the variety of options available.

Most writers’ workshops in the science fiction and fantasy field are variations on one of two basic models: the peer-to-peer critique group (sometimes known as the “Milford model,” from the workshop by that name, which ran its sessions in that manner) and the more classroom-oriented instructor-and-students method.

In a peer-to-peer workshop, writers at an approximately equal level of skill take turns presenting their own work to the group for discussion and critique, and in return provide criticism and commentary on the works of the other members. Traditionally, the member whose work is under discussion during a workshop meeting remains silent while the other members take turns giving their comments. Only after all the critiquers have finished may the writer respond to the commentary. In an instructor-led workshop, by contrast, one or more presenters (usually writers and editors with experience in the field) give lectures and provide guidance and manuscript evaluation to the students.

The peer-to-peer workshop model can be seen as a natural outgrowth of the groups of fans and writers who since the early days of the genre have read and critiqued each others’ attempts at fiction. Over time, more formalized local groups developed, and some of those groups became quite well-known and influential.

One such notable local group is the Austin, Texas, Turkey City Workshop, started in 1973 and still ongoing. Founding members of the workshop included Lisa Tuttle and Howard Waldrop, and Bruce Sterling is a notable alumnus. The workshop is also famous for the Turkey City Lexicon, a glossary of commonly used terms for workshop critique in the science fiction and fantasy field. Like most local critique groups, Turkey City is not an open workshop; admission is by invitation and approval of the current workshoppers.

Peer-to-peer workshops meet regularly in many North American cities with an active science fiction and fantasy fan presence, but an interested writer may have to expend some effort to seek them out. Area science fiction conventions, the internet, and local fans are all possible sources of information. Since the mid-1990s, workshop groups using modified versions of the peer-to-peer critique method have also flourished on the internet; the Science Fiction Online Writing Workshop and Critters are two of the best known.

Local critique groups and internet-based workshops have the advantage of being relatively inexpensive or even free. An individual workshopper’s primary contribution is always his or her active participation in the giving and receiving of critique. However, the quality of a peer-to-peer workshop is heavily dependent upon the skill level of its participants. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that any particular workshop will be open to new members.

Science fiction and fantasy writers in search of a more formal, or a more intensely immersive, learning experience can turn to one of the field’s several annual residential workshops. These workshops can be expensive, with the price of attendance rising as high as $5000 when tuition, fees, and room and board are all factored in. However, scholarships or work-study positions are available at some workshops to offset part of the cost of attendance. Residential workshops also require that the student be able to invest as much as six weeks of time in the experience.

The idea of a retreat-like multi-day writers’ workshop became a part of general American literary culture at about the same time that science fiction became a recognizable literary genre. The same year—1926—that saw the inaugural issue of Hugo Gernsback’s pioneer science fiction magazine
Amazing Stories, also saw the establishment of the prestigious mainstream Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, still held annually in rural Middlebury, Vermont. It would be three more decades, however, before SF could have a residential workshop of its own.

The first of the US-based residential science fiction writers’ workshops was the Milford Conference, founded in 1956 by science fiction writer, editor, and critic Damon Knight and by Knight’s wife and fellow science fiction writer Kate Wilhelm. The conference took its name from its initial location in Knight and Wilhelm’s home town of Milford, Pennsylvania. The Milford conferences used the peer-to-peer workshop model, which subsequently became the prevalent workshop model in the SF and fantasy field.

The US-based Milford conference is no longer running, but in 1972, British science fiction author James Blish founded Milford UK, a residential workshop based on the US model. Attendees at the first UK Milford included Brian Aldiss John Brunner, Ken Bulmer, and Anne McCaffrey. Originally meeting in Milford on Sea in Hampshire, the workshop presently meets on an annual basis in North Wales. Milford UK draws members from Britain, Europe, America and Australia; the minimum qualification for attending is a fiction sale to a paying market.

In 1968, author Robin Scott Wilson founded the Clarion Writer’s Workshop, which was initially held on the campus of Clarion State College in Pennsylvania. The new workshop used a variation on the Milford model, with the peer-to-peer critiques being supplemented by instruction and criticism from a roster of visiting instructors. The instructors were drawn from the ranks of working writers and editors, and each taught for a week at a time. This continues to be the basic format for Clarion, and for workshops closely based on the Clarion model.

Clarion is an intense six-week residential workshop with a small student body. The workshop has moved more than once over the decades since its founding, and is currently held in San Diego, California. Other workshops using the Clarion name and method are the Clarion West workshop, held in Seattle since 1971, and Clarion South, held biennially in Australia since 2002.

In 1996, science fiction and horror editor Jeanne Cavelos founded the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop, held since its inception on the campus of St. Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire. Odyssey is a six-week residential workshop on the Clarion model. It combines peer-to-peer critique with one-on-one instruction from Ms. Cavelos as the primary instructor. Other writers and editors in the genre make one-day guest lecturer appearances at the workshop.

The Odyssey workshop offers college credit upon request. It also provides an extensive and structured post-workshop experience, including critique groups, mailing lists, and a semi-annual newsletter.

In 1997, science fiction fan Rae Montor and the Martha’s Vineyard Science Fiction Association founded the Viable Paradise Writer’s Workshop, held annually in the autumn on the New England island of Martha’s Vineyard. VP runs on a heavily modified Clarion/Milford model: the length of the workshop is one week rather than six, and all eight instructors are in residence for the duration of the entire workshop. Peer-to-peer critique sessions are augmented with lectures and one-on-one meetings with instructors, as well as group discussions. Viable Paradise’s other distinguishing characteristic is a willingness to work with novels-in-progress as well as short fiction. (Clarion is explicitly a short story workshop; the guidelines for the Odyssey workshop allow for novels, but strongly suggest that short story submissions will provide for a better workshop experience.)

What kind of workshop is best? Only the individual writer can judge. Some writers may prefer the relatively low cost and regular meetings of a local peer-to-peer workshop; others may prefer the ability of an internet-based workshop to bring together critiquers who might otherwise be isolated.

For those writers who are searching for the more intense experience of a residential workshop, the time and expense of the workshop must be taken into account, as well as cost of travel to the workshop’s location, and of course the roster of instructors for that year’s session. (Over the long haul, a writer’s fellow-workshoppers will probably be more important and more memorable for him or her than any of the instructors—but in the absence of a functioning time machine, there’s no way to evaluate one’s classmates before sending in the application.) No single workshop is perfect for all students; each of the currently running major workshops has different strengths and very different learning atmospheres. It’s a good idea to talk to a couple of former students before enrolling in a workshop. (For instance, the Viable Paradise mottoes are “We don’t do ‘workshopping for blood’” and “It is not the goal of this workshop to make you cry. The writing life will do that to you all on its own.”)

Residential Workshops

Milford UK: http://www.milfordsf.co.uk/

Clarion: http://clarion.ucsd.edu/

Clarion West: http://www.clarionwest.org/

Clarion South: http://www.clarionsouth.org/

Odyssey: http://www.sff.net/odyssey/

Viable Paradise: http://www.viableparadise.com/

Online Workshops

Critters: http://www.critters.org/

Science Fiction Online Writing Workshop: http://sff.onlinewritingworkshop.com/

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Debra Doyle
is author or co-author of more than thirty books, and an instructor at Viable Paradise. She has a doctorate in English specializing in Anglo-Saxon literature from the University of Pennsylvania.

“We are living in interesting times; in fact, they’re so interesting that it is not currently possible to write near-future SF.”

—Charles Stross

Stross is a wickedly smart science fiction author with his finger on the pulse of changing technology who is also well aware of the lag time between writing a story and seeing it in print. Science fiction set in the very near future can become effectively obsolete before it is even published.

This is not just true about science fiction, or just true about the situation now, but it is perhaps more true about the genre and this epoch than in general. Still, stories written in the late 1980s that talked about the Soviet Union were destined to appear dated and strange rather quickly as that country rapidly disintegrated into its original parts. Today, the rush of revolution in the Middle East may similarly date stories set there, as uncertainty hovers concerning what that part of the world will be like in coming years.

While history isn’t static, and science and technology in particular move quickly, there are a number of things every serious science fiction writer must consider when building the world their story takes place within.

As suggested by Stross, technology is a primary issue that can date a story rapidly and cause future readers to lose their suspension of disbelief. Robert Heinlein’s spacefarers of the far future often did calculations using slide rules, jarring modern readers who pick up some of his classics. Some of the effects can be subtle, as ubiquitous cell phone use ruins many old plotlines, and as the consequences of ubiquitous technology of other sorts can make it too easy for characters to solve their problems. For very near-future science fiction, the technology is already on the drawing board and foreseeable, but when it hits, and how hard it hits, is next to impossible to foresee. Writers must be diligent and self-consistent with how they handle the technology. While blue jeans aren’t going to vanish in the next decade, the laptop or ebook reader might lose out to computer tablets—or not.

The science fiction writer has to consider economics, too, unfortunately. Computing power has continued to get cheaper and more common, but perhaps physical limits will ameliorate such trends. Or perhaps they will accelerate, and every child will have access to laptops and the internet, unless blocked by censoring governments. In the future, more and more people will carry gadgets with more and more capabilities. Looking beyond that horizon, one long-honored tradition is that machines will replace the labor force, leading to universal wealth and leisure time. That’s probably unrealistically utopian, but cheap robots and computing will replace some classes of jobs in the future, as they have already done so.

And what of the technology that applies to medicine? Do we manage to lick colds and the flu, or is it a never-ending battle? Cancer? AIDS? The possible advent of nanotechnology or other breakthroughs could result in greatly extended lifespan, which will forever alter human demographics and society.

Another key area that the futurist must invent for their story is how the environment has developed. Has global warming continued, and required Americans to sleep under mosquito netting or chance malaria? Or have we switched from fossil fuels to renewable energy, or even engaged in risky geoengineering? How about issues of biodiversity and mass extinctions? These are things that can continue to deteriorate, or be beaten either through regulation or the development of new technologies. One possible future can have fewer animal species, while another, perhaps equally plausible, has more as genetic engineering may allow the creation of new animals or the resurrection of those gone extinct. Mammoths grazing in pastures along the roadside would probably not be a detail about the world to skip in recounting a roadtrip of the future.

If a writer goes beyond the next few decades where these issues are paramount, science fiction has recognized a looming possibility that can totally rewrite the future. Science fiction author and computer scientist Vernor Vinge, along with inventor Ray Kurzweil, have postulated that the future may become intrinsically unpredictable due to the development of superhuman artificial intelligences. This horizon of our predictive power is called the Singularity. It has also been called the rapture of the nerds, a time when technology makes all things possible. Or not. Predictability is out the window when considering intelligences fundamentally smarter than human geniuses. Whether or not this event seems plausible, the science fiction writer must consider how smart computers can get and how fast, and how that affects the stories they create. Battlestar Galactica and Terminator are stories of disaster brought on by smart computers, for instance. Such creations need not lead to disaster, but their existence will cause profound changes.

As longer timescales are considered, humanity will stumble in some way, or move into space for the duration (the Earth and sun will not last forever). The space environment poses certain logistical issues as does the Singularity and the advance of biotechnology. Humans can colonize space and other worlds as variations of our current form, or as totally different biologically engineered creations, or even as human-machine hybrids. Writers must have a sense of this within the future they create and what makes sense, and be able to justify the logic. This is the invention of not just the future, but of an exodus into the universe.

The technologies of space travel must be considered. It is a common conceit of science fiction that faster-than-light (FTL) travel is possible, and that it makes colonizing the galaxy similar to the colonization of other continents across Earth’s oceans. Einstein’s relativity suggests that FTL is impossible, although some cheats like wormholes or local warping of spacetime might still be possible. It is important, but often neglected, to realize that FTL implies time travel and the violation of causality unless free will is an illusion. FTL is so commonly done that most writers and consumers ignore the philosophical implications. Still, they’re real.

As stories enter the far future, there is still another important issue: are we alone? Recent advances in astronomy indicate that planets are common, and Earthlike planets are not excessively rare. Every writer dealing with far-future humans exploring the galaxy must evaluate whether or not the Milky Way is a place teeming with life, perhaps developed civilizations (and why contact took so long), or if humans are unique.

Finally, in the case of the far-far future, is the sky the limit? Or is it beyond the sky? Will humans continue in one form or another, or will they go extinct with their sun, or something more inevitable like the heat death of the universe?

There are a lot of questions to consider, from what technology electronic books will be read on in the next few years, to whether or not the human species will persist in some form or other into a changing universe. There are many plausible but contradictory futures to sort from, and the choices will be informed both by research and the perspective of the writer, whether optimist or pessimist about how our civilization adjusts to the risks and rewards of our increasing technological capabilities. This is the challenge of the science fiction writer in addition to finding a story to tell that illuminates the human condition.

Perhaps it is impossible to do, to invent the future, but that is the challenge awaiting the science fiction writers when they sit down to the keyboard. It isn’t easy. It isn’t even possible to get it right, probably, as Charles Stross tells us, but it must be attempted. To tell even the simplest story set in the future, it is necessary to invent that future.

* * * *

Mike Brotherton
is the author of the science fiction novels
Star Dragon
(2003) and
Spider Star
(2008), both from Tor Books. He’s also a professor of astronomy at the University of Wyoming and conducts research of active galaxies using the Hubble Space Telescope and nearly every observatory that will give him time on their facilities. He is the founder of the NASA and National Science Foundation funded Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop for Writers, which brings a dozen award-winning professional writers to Wyoming every summer. He blogs about science and science fiction at http://www.mikebrotherton.com.