How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (3 page)

The most complete definition will come to you only one way, and it isn’t easy. You have to know everything ever published as speculative fiction or fantasy. Of course, you want to begin writing sf and fantasy
before
you die, so you know that you can’t read every single book or story. You’ll have to read a representative sample to get a feel for what has already been done in the field.

What makes this complicated is that the genres of science fiction and fantasy include not only what speculative fiction writers are writing now, but also everything they have ever written. This is because the entire history of speculative fiction as a self-conscious genre spans a single lifetime. Jack Williamson, for instance, was writing in the 1930s, when the adventure tradition of Merritt and Haggard and the gosh-wow science of Verne predominated. He is still writing today, producing work that is taken seriously by the most modern and sophisticated of speculative fiction readers.

Fiction from every period of speculative fiction is still in print, not because it is required reading in college and high school English classesthankfully it isn’t-but because the community of speculative fiction readers keeps it alive.

Go into the sf/fantasy section of your bookstore and you’ll find both recent works and early, seminal books by living authors like Aldiss, Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Ellison, LeGuin, and Norton.

In the same section you’ll find books by late great writers like Alfred Bester, James Blish, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Heinlein, Robert Howard, E. E. “Doc” Smith, and J. R. R. Tolkien.

You’ll also find relatively young writers like Larry Niven, Anne McCaffrey, Jack Chalker, C. J. Cherryh, David Drake, Octavia Butler, and Roger Zelazny.

And there’ll be books by writers so new they have only a handful of titles in print, like Charles de Lint, William Gibson, Lisa Goldstein, James Patrick Kelly, Megan Lindholm, Pat Murphy, Pamela Sargent, and Bruce Sterling.

In fact, that’s not a bad reading list, though it’s far from complete. Even if you’ve already read quite a bit of science fiction, if any of those names sound unfamiliar to you then you need to do some homework. Pick several names from each group, buy a couple of inexpensive paperbacks by each author you choose, and read. You’ll begin to get a sense of the breadth and depth of this field you’re planning to write in. Some of the books you won’t care for a bit. Some you’ll admire. Some you’ll love. Some will transform you.

Still, all that reading can take months. Though you’ll have to do it eventually, you can start your education as a science fiction reader more modestly. Get a good overview of the field -I suggest David Hartwell’s book
Age of Wonder: Exploring the World of Science Fiction
or James Gunn’s
Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction.
Then get your hands on these great anthologies:
The Science Fiction Hall of Fame
(ed. Silverberg, Bova),
Dangerous Visions
and
Again, Dangerous Visions
(ed. Ellison), and
The Best
of
the Nebulas
(ed. Bova). Finally, subscribe to
Asimov’s
and
F&SF
and read them from cover to cover every month; you should also sample
Analog, Aboriginal SF, Omni,
and
Amazing Stories.

The Science Fiction Hall
of
Fame is
an anthology of the short stories, novelettes, and novellas voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America

As The best ever publishedx up to 1966,
the year that the SFWA was organized. There is no better collection of classic short science fiction from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.

Dangerous Visions
and its sequel,
Again, Dangerous Visions, were
meant by editor Harlan Ellison to be anthologies of work considered too dangerous to appear in the magazines. However, before
Again, Dangerous Visions
came out, the magazines themselves had been transformed enough that the stories didn’t seem so dangerous anymore. It doesn’t matter they are an excellent snapshot of most of the best writers producing innovative short fiction during the sixties and early seventies, most of whom are still major figures in the field today.

The Best of the Nebulas is
an anthology of the Nebula-winning short stories, novelettes, and novellas published between 1966 and 1988 that were voted best by the members of the
SFWA
in the late 1980s.

And the current issues of the magazines will show you what is happening right this minute in the field of speculative fiction.

Read all this and you’ll have a very good sense, not only of what science fiction (and to a lesser degree fantasy) has been and is becoming, but also of what sort of science fiction you are drawn to.

You may discover that your taste in science fiction is quite old-fashioned-that you don’t like most of the stories in the Ellison anthologies, but love many in the
Hall of Fame.
No problem-those “old-fashioned” stories are still very much in demand, both in the magazines and at book length.

Or you may be interested only in the hottest, most innovative entries in the current issues of the magazines. Fine-there’s always room for more.

Or you may realize that
nobody is
doing anything you really care for, and your fiction is going to stand the whole field on its ear. That, too, is perfectly acceptableyou don’t have to imitate anybody; it’s usually better if you don’t. But, having read at least a sampling of stories from every era and tradition within the field, you’ll at least know what has been done before: what cliches the audience will be weary of, what expectations the audience will bring to your tale, what you have to explain, and what you can take for granted.

One warning, though. If you try to read everything so as not to repeat an idea that has already been used, you’ll go mad. And even then, after your brilliant, original story has been published, some helpful reader will point out that the exact same idea was used in an obscure story by Lloyd

Biggle, Jr., or Edmund Hamilton or John W. Campbell or H. Beam Piper or … you get the picture.

You’re reading all these stories to get a sense of how science fiction is done, not to become paranoid and decide that you can never come up with any new ideas as good as these. When I was reading Middle English romances for a graduate class at Notre Dame, I realized that almost every one of these thirteenth-century stories would make a terrific science fiction novel if you just changed the sea to space and the boats to starships.

And most science fiction novels could easily be turned into fantasy by changing starships back into ocean-going vessels. Frank Herbert’s
Dune
would fit right in with the best medieval romances, if planets became continents and the spice became a source of magical power instead of a drug necessary for space navigation. There is nothing new under the sun or beyond it, either.

The novelty and freshness you’ll bring to the field won’t come from the new ideas you think up. Truly new ideas are rare, and usually turn out to be variations on old themes anyway. No, your freshness will come from the way you think, from the person you are; it will inevitably show up in your writing, provided you don’t mask it with heavy-handed formulas or cliches.

If there’s one thing you should learn from reading all these tales, it’s that, unlike many other genres, speculative fiction is not bound to follow any particular formula. There
are
a few formulas, it’s true, but most stories don’t follow them-or else follow them only because what may seem to be a formula is really a mythic story that has shown up in every culture where stories have been told at all.

For science fiction and fantasy are the genres in which stories can hew closest to the archetypes and myths that readers in all times and places have hungered for. That’s why writers in other genres often reach for
our
tools when they have a particularly powerful story to tell, as witness Mary Stewart’s Merlin books, Mary Renault’s novels of the ancient Hellenic world, E. L. Doctorow’s slightly fractured history, and John Irving’s talking-animal figures.

Writers of mythic stories don’t use “formulas”; they just tell the stories they bclieve in and care about. Inevitably, archetypal themes will show up again and again. But they only work if you are not aware of them; the moment you consciously treat them as formulas, they lose the power to stir the blood of any but the most naive readers.

Boundary 4: The Literature of the Strange

Having carefully explained to you that science fiction and fantasy are merely labels for (1) an arbitrary, viselike publishing category, (2) a fluid, evolving community of readers and writers, and (3) a ghetto in which you can do almost anything you like once you learn what others have already done, I will now essay a real definition of the terms.

This last boundary is the clearest-and probably the least accuratedefinition of science fiction and fantasy:

Speculative fiction includes all stories that take place in a setting contrary to known reality.

This includes:

1. All stories set in the future, because the future can’t be known. This includes all the stories speculating about future technologies, which is, for some people, the only thing that science fiction is good for. Ironically, many stories written in the forties and fifties that were set in what was then the future-the sixties, seventies, and eightiesare no longer “futuristic.” Yet they aren’t “false,” either, because few science fiction writers pretend that they are writing what will happen. Rather we write what might happen. So those out-of-date futures, like that depicted in the novel 1984, simply shift from the “future” category to:

2. All stories set in the historical past that contradict known facts of history. Within the field of science fiction, these are called “alternate world” stories. For instance, what if the Cuban Missile Crisis had led to nuclear war? What if Hitler had died in 1939? In the real world, of course, these events did not happen-so stories that take place in such false pasts are the purview of science fiction and fantasy.

3. All stories set on other worlds, because we’ve never gone there. Whether “future humans” take part in the story or not, if it isn’t Earth, it belongs to fantasy and science fiction.

4. All stories supposedly set on Earth, but before recorded history and contradicting the known archaeological record-stories about visits from ancient aliens, or ancient civilizations that left no trace, or “lost kingdoms” surviving into modern times.

5. All stories that contradict some known or supposed law of nature. Obviously, fantasy that uses magic falls into this category, but so does

much science fiction: time travel stories, for instance, or invisibleman stories.

In short, science fiction and fantasy stories are those that take place in worlds that have never existed or are not yet known.

The moment I offer this definition, however, I can think of many examples of stories that fit within these boundaries yet are not considered science fiction or fantasy by
anyone.
For instance, despite some romanticizing, Felix Salten’s wonderful novel
Bambi is
a brutally accurate account of the lives of deer. Yet because in his book the animals talk to each other, something that animals simply do not do, does
Bambi
become fantasy? Perhaps, after a fashion-but you’ll never find it in the fantasy section of the bookstore; you’ll never find it on any fantasy fan’s list of his fifty favorite fantasy novels. It doesn’t fall within the boundaries of the publishing category, the expectations of the community of readers and writers, or even the raw listing of what sf and fantasy writers have written.

What about
The Odyssey
and
The Iliad?
They contain magic and gods aplenty, and it’s hard to imagine any contemporary reader claiming that they represent the way the world
really
was at the time of the Trojan War, yet they were composed for an audience that believed in these gods and these heroes. To taleteller and talehearer, they were poems about history and not fantasies at all; they were epic, not mythic, tales.

Indeed, there are many who would claim that my definition of speculative fiction clearly includes the Bible and
Paradise Lost,
though there are many other people today who would be outraged to hear of either being classified as fantasy.

And what do we make of jean Auel’s prehistoric romances? They certainly contradict an archaeologist’s vision of the past, yet they are presented as if they correspond to reality. And what about genre-bending books like the recent
Moondust and Madness
or Jacqueline Susann’s posthumously published first novel,
Yargo?
Both have spaceships and visitors from other planets, but everything else about them clearly identifies them as pure romance novels, with no hint of any knowledge or understanding of the science fiction tradition. They fit my definition-but anyone familiar with what science fiction and fantasy
really
are would repudiate them at once.