Writing Science Fiction

I am about to boldly go where many an author has gone before, so you’ll have to forgive me if this blog comes as no surprise to you. Science Fiction has, though, several distinctive tropes which writers need to know and I also thought that I’d drop a word of warning at the end.

Science Fiction and the Fantasy genre both fall under the umbrella of Speculative fiction which includes all stories that take place in a setting contrary to reality. As a rough and ready guide for distinguishing between the two: if the story is set in a universe that follows the same rules as ours - people need oxygen or spaceships need fuel, for example - its science fiction; if it’s set in a universe that doesn’t follow our rules and where there are mythical beasts and people have magical powers it’s fantasy. So anything with dragons, Fantasy, anything with engineering, Science Fiction. You will know of course many novels that don’t fit this neat encapsulation.

SF stories are usually set in the future, although some may posit alien visitors or unknown civilisations in pre-human times or be set in a parallel world, providing an alternative history - Hitler invades Britain, for example, or Harmony Five rules in Weatherly’s 1940’s America.

The future regularly includes space travel, the stories set on other worlds. This entails future technologies (think worm holes, hyperspace and FTL drives) which are half the charm for SF aficionados. SF imagines future living conditions, modes of transport, future weaponry and usually much advanced artificial intelligence in all its forms, from non-sentient robots to Philip K Dick’s Rick Deckard. Clones often figure. While aliens are a standard fixture they are rarely benign.

Importantly the future includes new forms of government - empires galactican of every description, from Asimov’s seminal Foundation to Panem in The Hunger Games. In almost all cases the plucky protagonists are fighting the system in power and this has provided one of the most durable off-shoots of the SF genre, the Dystopian novel. On a future earth the heroes have to fight not only the results of pollution, global warming, pestilence and nuclear war amongst other horrors but also an evil government. 

One of the appeals of all fiction is that it takes its readers to unfamiliar places but the SF world is usually so different from ours the readers need to have the background explained before they can follow the plot. Gradually leading them into the strangeness and avoiding the info-dump, while introducing the story and characters at the same time, is hard but the author needs to keep exposition in its place. Leak it little by little.

In hard science fiction the science is very important - in fact at some point the plot should hinge on it - so if you intend to blind us with quarks and positrons you need to get them right. A ‘hard’ SF story can only contradict a known law of nature if you can provide a rational explanation or a  device to overcome it (worm holes, ansibles, faster than light drives). SF readers really want to know about the internal workings of your space ship or the rules by which your time machine functions and will not be happy if you don’t explain. In this setting acronyms assist credibility but the reader needs to know what they stand for.  Using invented jargon sparsely will make it more effective. Once the rules have been made plain you must abide by them, so if you need a wormhole to get from Vega to Arcturus you can’t come back without it. Jules Verne wouldn’t, today, get away with taking his protagonists to the centre of the earth where it’s 5000° centigrade with only pith helmets for protection. When the aging Battlestar Galactica, shot in documentary style, had to be repaired by Cylon technology it was silicon based, thus abiding by our world rules. Plausibility is key.

Perhaps because of the apparent prevalence of the Toys for Boys scenarios and the frequently less than gripping human interaction it was thought that SF could not be in any way ‘literary’, although it is clear that great SF writers like Kurt Vonnegut or Kazuo Ishiguro transcend this judgement. Orson Scott Card thought that SF writers were imprisoned by publishers in a science fiction ghetto, so perhaps it is not surprising that many literary agents have NO SCIENCE FICTION in their submission instructions. Some authors, therefore, use a different pseudonym for their SF novels like Ian Banks, who  wrote his SF works as Iain M Banks. Or some self-publish. American publishers appear keener on SF than others so one could try there. 

And in the interim, folks, spool up your FTL drives, write the books, live long and prosper.

Jaye Sarasin is the author of The Green Enclave (Parfoys Press 2017) and Using Literature in Language Teaching (Macmillan, 1986) Former teacher/translator, now living in Yorkshire. www.jayesarasin.co.uk