Making It Up As You Go Along

Recently, I've been working on a near-future sf short story. For this story, I needed the name and location of a small town in central Asia. The plot required that the inhabitants of this town belong to a sufficiently small ethnic group for their origin to be identified by their genes. And the town had to be remote enough for no one to notice if its population disappeared pretty much overnight.

I was explaining my dilemma to a friend, and he said, "Why don't you just make one up?"

Fifteen years ago, I'd have had no choice. The town would have to be invented. And if my invented details were a little implausible, it's extremely unlikely anyone would ever notice.

Now, I can use the Web. I can go hunting in Wikipedia, or on Google Maps. Not to mention using online translation tools to read web sites in other languages. I can find a real town to use in my story. And, if I'm lucky, I might even be able to find photographs taken in that town. So when the protagonist of my story visits it, I'll be able to describe the town as it actually is.

I explained this to my friend, and he said, "You could still make one up."

Well, yes. I could. But that's not the point. Science fiction is not about making it up as you go along. If I invent an alien planet, that planet is still subject to the laws of physics - so no breathable atmospheres at 1013.25 millibars on a planet with the same density as Earth but half the diameter. If I set a story on a moon of Saturn (as I have done), then I want it to be as close as possible to the real life moon of Saturn. I have in the past searched the NASA web site for artists' impressions of Saturn's moons - just to learn the angle at which Saturn's rings will appear to a person stood on the surface of a particular moon.

And yet probably no one would ever notice if I got it wrong. The same is true for that central Asian town. Who actually cares if it's real or not?

I do.

It's important to me that the details of a story are right at every level. Even if it's fantasy. Or space opera.

And I now have a powerful tool on my desk which allows me to get the details right: the Web.

So if you'll excuse me, I have some research to do...

This is the future we have made...

Here's cause for optimism.... Well not, really.

You don't expect accuracy, or much in the way of truth, from a newspaper, least of all a conservative one. But you'd at least hope that the science correspondent actually knew something about science. Clearly this wasn't considered necessary for the Daily Telegraph. As this headline on their web site, 2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved, shows. I mean, that's not only wrong, it's deliberately perverse.

If there's a planet earth created by public perception, by the distorted information and misinformation fed to people by various media, by history, by opinion - a sort of semiosphere of smoke and mirrors... then honesty compels us not to write about that world. Science fiction writers are not journalists, true; but if journalists no longer document reality, someone has to. Science fiction may be the best tool for the job.

This Year In My Words

Well, I wrote a lot more in 2008, and not just on this blog - 89 posts (including this one) compared to 49 last year. My most popular post - and I use the adjective advisedly - was Don't Look Back in Awe. This was picked up by io9 and a slew of other blogs... and as a result my hits shot through the roof. Overlooked Classics also did quite well as it was posted on reddit.com. The other posts which received higher than average hits were the "list" ones: Overlooked Classics Part 2, 20 British SF Novels You Should Read and Top Ten Obscure SF Films. Perhaps I'll knock together a few more lists in 2009. Um, maybe I should conflate Don't Look Back in Awe with a list post, something like 20 SF Classics Which Are Actually Crap, for example... Top of that list would be Asimov's Foundation trilogy, I think. Then again, perhaps I won't...

I also wrote more fiction, and even sold some. The actual stats look like this:

Completed: 6
Submitted: 28
Rejected: 19
Waiting for response: 5

Sold
'Thicker Than Water' to Jupiter
'Killing the Dead' to Postscripts
'The Amber Room' to Pantechnicon

I'll post to this blog when the stories are actually published, so you can rush out and buy copies of the magazines. Many copies.

I also wrote two book reviews for Interzone - Template by Matthew Hughes in IZ 218, and Lexicon Urthus, Second Edition by Michael Andre-Druissi in IZ 219.

And six DVD reviews for VideoVista.net - Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!, Vexille, Jacqueline Hyde, Psycho Beach Party, Sordid Lives and Lost in Austen.

All in all, not an unproductive year. I'd have liked it to have been more productive, though. But I'm determined to do even more in 2009 - two novels to complete, more short fiction, more poetry, a bunch of other projects, plus the reviews...

It only remains for me to wish everyone a Happy New Year, and all the best in 2009. And, as they say, keep watching the skies.

Optimism - A Bad Fit For SF?

Why doesn't science fiction write about shiny happy futures? Why is it all doom and gloom? In these troubled times, shouldn't the genre be focusing on what's right, what's good, what we can make better?

Well, no.

It's all very well writing about gleaming futures full of food pills and jetcars, as if - like in William Gibson's 'The Gernsback Continuum' - doing so would dream it into being. It's all very well positing a future in a science fiction short story in which today's problems no longer exist. It's all very well showing how, in a sf text, today's problems could be solved.

But isn't that irresponsible?

The world is as it is; it is in many respects how we have made it. If science fiction is to have relevance, this is something it must acknowledge. It is something it must discuss. Just because in a novel a real world regime is overthrown in 2020 AD... it doesn't mean that novel can't discuss the moral choices made by the leaders of that regime.

Science fiction can, perhaps, show what might be the effects in one hundred years of decisions taken now - for example, which do we protect: profits or the environment? What are the consequences of choosing one over the other? Why do some people privilege themselves - i.e., profits - over everyone else - i.e., the environment? And should we let them be the ones making the decisions?

Science fiction is not about prediction. It is no longer primarily didactic. But that does not mean it cannot inform. And more than that, it can inform on the important issues. Racial survival. Human rights. The impact of new sciences and technologies. Economics. Politics. Morality. Philosophy.

Writing about a bunch of geeks killing a bunch of gooks with ever more awesome weaponry is cowardice. It's a failure to engage with the real world. The problem is not that nations are at war, it's that nations go to war. The latter is fit for speculation, the former is not.

If it is possible to write optimistic science fiction, then it can only be by focusing on the quotidian, by writing fictions which are intensely personal, which look for small everyday victories, which ignore the big questions. Some might call that a failure of imagination.

Science fiction doesn't need to be optimistic, it needs to be honest.

The Future of Science Fiction?

My last post seems to have caused a bit of a fuss, with responses, agreements and commentary appearing in a surprisingly huge number of different places. At last count, it was about 22 separate blogs and sites. It was the Great August Bank Holiday Blog Storm.

I was amused by the various "facts" about me which appeared in some of the comment threads. I'm apparently a kid, who has read none of the classics. I'm also a published author, who is trying to promote his own books, or is jealous of classic writers' success.

For the record, I've been reading science fiction for about 30 years (so not a kid, then), and that includes most of the classics. I didn't write Don't Look Back in Awe to boost sales of my own book or short stories. That would be difficult because I've not been published yet - although I do have an agent, John Jarrold, and I have sold some short fiction.

You know what they say about assumptions: they make you look like a complete idiot.

Ah well. Debate is good. Or so I'm told.

I think my favourite comment from the whole affair was the incredulous bleat of some fan who couldn't understand why Foundation was out-of-date as it's set 20,000 years in the future...

Here, however, is a topic which follows on quite nicely from the aforementioned infamous post: what do I actually want science fiction to be?

I want it to be... a toolbox.

I want science fiction to be seen as a set of tools that writers - of whatever stripe - can use to tell a story. Action-adventure, "literary fiction", thriller, satire, romance... it doesn't matter. Sf is called a genre, but it's characterised by its furniture. Thrillers aren't. Romances aren't. They have their conventions, yes; but their setting doesn't actually define them.

I'm not saying we should throw away the label "science fiction", or remove the marketing category and hide all the sf books in amongst the general fiction. Nor am I saying we should stop thinking of ourselves as sf readers or fans.

But as writers and commentators, I would like to see the tools of science fiction be recognised as tools of writing. Good science fiction, after all, still has to be good fiction. Too many people seem to forget that. They focus on the idea as paramount. Foregrounding the idea is not an excuse for bad writing.

Science fiction should be good writing using the tools of the genre. It should be judged as writing which happens to use the tools of the genre. It gets no special dispensation because it's science fiction, because it has this great big flashing idea going bang in your face.

If you look at a lot of modern sf, then you can sort of see this approach in action. Not just the military action-adventure of David Weber and Jack Campbell, fighting various historical wars with spaceships. But also in excellent novels such as Richard Morgan's Black Man, which uses the tools of science fiction to hoist a near-future thriller into a position where it can ask the sort of questions, and make the kind of commentary, we demand of good science fiction. And that we often can't get, in fact, from other genres.

I'm going to leave this here for now. I suspect it needs more thought - if only to determine whether or not I'm reinventing some kind of wheel. Or pointing out something that's bleeding obvious.

Don't Look Back in Awe

Here we go again. I've complained before about the undeserving admiration given to many science fiction novels and short stories of earlier decades. Such reverence frequently results in fans recommending these works to people wanting to try the genre. And that's not a good thing. Readers new to the genre are not served well by recommendations to read Isaac Asimov, EE 'Doc' Smith, Robert Heinlein, or the like. Such fiction is no longer relevant, is often written with sensibilities offensive to modern readers, usually has painfully bad prose, and is mostly hard to find because it's out of print. A better recommendation would be a current author - such as Richard Morgan, Alastair Reynolds, Iain M Banks, Ken MacLeod, Stephen Baxter, and so on.

I can hear howls of outrage across the tinterweb.

And so I say again: holding up Foundation or Second Stage Lensman as good introductions to sf will no longer wash. They're historical documents. In those days, science fiction was a different place; they did things differently. And many "classics" of those days do not fare well when compared to modern works.

I recently reread 'Nightfall' by Isaac Asimov, in the anthology A Science Fiction Omnibus. 'Nightfall' was first published in the September 1941 issue of Astounding Stories. In the story, the world of Lagash has six suns, and only ever experiences darkness once every 2,049 years. A group of astronomers have calculated that a "night" is imminent, and realised it's the cause of their cyclical history.

I vaguely recall first reading the story when I was around eleven or twelve. I've long been aware of its status as a "classic", of its reputation as one of Asimov's best stories. So I was surprised on my recent reread to discover that it's, well, it's pretty bad. Asimov's prose was clunky at best, and it's not his best in 'Nightfall'. The world-building is lacklustre and slipshod - characters have names like Sheerin 501 and Beenay 25, and that's it. In all other respects, it could be set in 1940s USA. The ending - the darkness and resulting panic - is given away on the first page. Much of the "idea" is explained in conversation by the cast. The narration even pulls out of the story at one point, destroying the compact with the reader (ignore the bad grammar, a sentence fragment wodged onto a sentence with a semi-colon):

"Not Earth's feeble thirty-six hundred Stars visible to the eye; Lagash was in the center of a giant cluster."

By all criteria, 'Nightfall' fails as a good short story. And yet it's still regarded as a classic. Some people will even suggest it's a good example of science fiction. Rubbish. It's built around a single, not very interesting idea - a world has never seen darkness... and then it gets dark. Wow. There's a comment on the boom-bust nature of civilisations in there, but it's pretty much thrown away. Asimov uses it in much more detail some ten years later in Foundation, anyway.

In part, this harkens back to my earlier post about the primacy of idea in science fiction. 'Nightfall' contains a very obvious idea and it appears to me that many think the sheer in-your-face nature of it overrides all the story's faults. Which should not be the case. A story should be considered a classic for a number of reasons - continuing relevance, good writing, originality (in ideas and/or deployment), rigour (of world-building, of story), meaning, impact upon the genre, impact upon the reader...

Shining the spotlight upon idea leaves all else in darkness (seems an appropriate metaphor for a piece citing 'Nightfall'). In fact, the more an idea or trope is used, the more polished it becomes, and so the higher its albedo.

The howling is becoming deafening now, so I'll finish by saying I don't think we should refuse to read old classic works, but we must recognise that they're historical documents. And add that caveat to any such recommendations or commentary. Further, modern sf readers shouldn't need to be aware of everything which has gone before, but modern sf writers certainly ought to.

The Joy of Cartography

It's Monday, so let's ramble...

World-building is like the proverbial iceberg. It's only the top ten percent you see in the story. Or rather, it's only the top ten percent you should see in a story. For example, drawing up a map of your galactic empire or fantasy continent is useful when working out how your characters get about, but is there any real need to share it with your readers? If you create it with the intention of sharing it with your readers, you're going to be filling it with detail. Drawing little mountains and planets. Dreaming up names for all the worlds and hamlets the characters don't actually visit. All time-consuming tasks.

Time that would be better spent working on your story.

Plus, of course, you'll get it wrong somewhere. Rivers that flow uphill, earthlike planets orbiting outside a star's habitable zone. You could, of course, research - to make sure you get all the details right. That's time-consuming too.

Time that would be better spent working on your story.

It seems de rigeur these days to open a high fantasy novel with a map, but what do they actually add to the story? Very little. However, they do increase the immersive quality of the story. And that's what many readers seem to want these days. The plot is almost incidental - a group of archetypes doing archetypal things, or perhaps stereotypes doing stereotypical things. The plot, as such, is often just an excuse to bimble about the fantasy world. With a bit of derring-do and suspense thrown in for good measure. Not to mention a good sword-fight or battle as well.

Maps are less prevalent in science fiction novels. The Evergence trilogy by Sean Williams and Shane Dix features a galactic map in an appendix. I'm fairly sure one or two novels by CJ Cherryh also have maps. There are likely plenty more, but I can't think of any off the top of my head. But, as a general rule, they're rare.

There's an expectation these days that a fantasy novel will open with a map - created, of course, by the genre's exemplar, The Lord of the Rings. It's become a convention. In fact, given that much of fantasy's furniture is filched from various historical periods, it strikes me that the genre's conventions are not so much plot enablers as they are attributes of the story... Map. Quest. Plot coupons. Peasant-Hero. Hidden King. Dark Lord.

Perhaps that's the chief difference between science fiction and fantasy. In sf, ideas enable the plot; in fantasy they're the story's framework.

Making Worlds...

Another Monday morning, another Monday morning ramble. When I posted my last ramble, and described it as such, I'd no intention of it being a regular thing. But what the hell. At least calling it a "ramble" means I don't have to put forward a coherent argument. Or even make much sense.

And so, on that note...

Things work the way they do. And, in most cases, we know how that is. Not just physical laws, but society, politics, history, technology... An average reader is unlikely to be an expert in all these, but they know enough. So if, in a mainstream novel, the protagonist drives from London to Glasgow in an hour, we know the writer should go and check Google Maps again.

But in an sf novel, where the background consists chiefly of genre furniture and literary devices...

Much of the trappings of science fiction are convention, rather than any real attempt at constructing a scientifically rigorous future. (This is why sf is not prediction.) Stories set on galactic stages require an abundance of earth-like planets. Yes, exoplanets are more common than we had anticipated, but we've yet to find an habitable one. The worlds of the story exist because the story requires them. And, since our heroes need to travel from world to world to resolve the plot, some form of interstellar drive also becomes a necessity. It doesn't have to be real, it doesn't have to be based on real-world theorising - such as the Alcubierre Drive.

World-building is the art of choosing genre conventions which fit the story. And without which the story could not take place. That's the important bit - no convention(s), no story. If the plot still works without the genre trappings, it's not science fiction. It's a western in space. Or a WWII story in space. Or the Napoleonic Wars in space. Or...

A purist would claim you use only those genre conventions necessary for the plot. After all, the plot is the thing. But the rest of the background, that's chrome; that's the the bright shiny stuff the writer hopes will distinguish their novel from their rivals. That's what readers look for when they want immersion. They want the story's universe to give the appearance of life outside the story.

And this is where it gets difficult. The writer of a science fiction novel might well be an expert on the world of that novel. After all, they invented it. But that world has to convince on every level. The details have to be right. Earth needs to rotate the right way. No using parachutes to land on airless moons. No earthlike planets sailing gracefully through intergalactic space.

Conventions will only get you so far. And they only pass muster for the most part because they've been tested repeatedly during the past 80 years. Perhaps this is why such story mechanisms have changed little. Evolution is a slow process. Those which have survived the testing process have shown they work. They don't need fixing.

But using conventions makes a novel conventional.

And the good ones are anything but that.

Searching for Coincidences While Travelling Faster-Than-Light

It's self-evident that technology has made the job of writing much easier. The word-processor is a far more efficient and effective tool than the typewriter (although, with the advent of in-line spell-checking, you'd have thought the standard of spelling would improve). The Web has also provided a low-cost distribution channel, which gives even the meanest of scribblers access to a potential worldwide audience. And then there's the access the Web gives to useful information. Of course, you need filters firmly in place - there's a lot of crap out there masquerading as "fact".

It occurred to me recently that it's not just in the "business" of writing that technology has proven a boon. Yes, it has expanded the possibilities for plots, but it has also affected the mechanics of plots. A particular example of this came to mind. Take a story written, or set, for example, in the first half of the Twentieth Century...

In order to advance the plot, the protagonist has to track down the femme fatale. He's met her, but suspects the name she gave him was false. He can either ask about at the location where he met her, in the hope that someone recognises his description and so provides her correct name. Or, and this is a common technique in stories of this ilk, he stumbles across a photograph of her in the local newspaper's society pages. A lucky coincidence. And the plot moves on.

Let's transpose our story to the Twenty-First Century - or even after. Our protagonist could still find his femme fatale using leg-work. Or...

He could search the Web.

It's not unlikely that the woman should appear somewhere on the Internet. In fact, these days it's almost certain. Almost everyone is there somewhere - especially a woman who would appear in a newspaper's society pages... It's only a matter of defining plausible search criteria for the protagonist to use - a visual search may not be commonplace at the moment, but soon it may well be trivial. Our plot no longer needs an incredible coincidence to advance. Technology has given us a much more plausible alternative. And if this is science fiction, then there's nothing stopping us inventing even more useful tools. Providing, of course, they're consistent within the universe of the story, and not too wildly implausible in and of themselves.

The Web itself may not have been foreseen forty years ago - Bill Gates himself famously predicted the CD-ROM would be the "next big thing" in personal computing in the first edition of The Road Ahead in 1995 - but the Web does not contradict what we currently know about our world and the universe. Well, not unless you're looking it up on the Conservapedia, that is.

Science fiction, however... Well, these days, sf seems all too ready to throw the laws of physics out of the window. It's not just the sort of stuff that's been rejected by Mundane SF - i.e., anything that isn't "a believable use of technology and science as it exists at the time the story is written". Media sf - films and television - has given us, for example, spaceships that rumble (sound doesn't carry in a vacuum), spaceships that swoop and bank in space (so much for Newton's Laws), not to mention all those alien races which happen to bear a remarkable resemblance to humans.

But does sf really need to adhere so rigorously to the laws of physics? Okay, sound in space is just plain silly. But, to me, the faster-than-light drive is a literary device. It doesn't have to be scientifically plausible, it only needs to get the characters from A to B, the plot from Y to Z.The distances involved in interstellar travel make most plots set outside the Solar system impossible. Some have tried: William Barton's Dark Sky Legion posits a slower-than-light human empire held together by agents who travel for thousands of years from world to world, ensuring none stray too far from the imperial template. It's an excellent novel. Also excellent are Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space novels, which feature slower-than-light travel. In both cases, the lack of FTL is a world-building choice by the authors.

And so back to my point about googling for the femme fatale. Most people don't know how a Web search works. It's black box technology. And there's no need to explain its workings when it's used in a story. It's a plot enabler. It also happens to be real. FTL is not real, but it's also chiefly there to enable the plot. The same can be said of other non-Mundane elements in a science fiction story. Time travel. Alien races. A statistically unlikely abundance of Earth-like worlds. Artificial Intelligence.

Technology has expanded the range of plot enablers available in science fiction. Or, at the very least, it has provided opportunities to conceive of new ones. We know more about the universe now than writers back in the 1940s did, and yet all many sf authors have done is trick up those old inventions - FTL, and ever more ludicrous weaponry, for example - in modern scientific jargon. Where's the leap equivalent to society pages --> Google? Science fiction often seems to be a history of discrete ideas - time travel, FTL, the Singularity... And because the focus is on those ideas as ideas, their role in enabling the plot is ignored.

And so the plot mechanics remain unchanged - and the gloss gets glossier, the surface gets more polished, and science fiction turns yet more escapist and less relevant...

(This has been a Monday morning ramble, and may well be followed up at a later date when I've managed to construct a coherent argument out of the thoughts which resulted in the above.)

Alt.Fiction 2008

That's the third alt.fiction finished. And each year it has grown bigger, and more areas of the labyrinthine Assembly Rooms have been opened to the event. I only made it to only two items during the day - a reading from his new novel, Kéthani, by Eric Brown (with the able assistance/prompting of Tony Ballantyne), and a talk by my agent, John Jarrold. I did want to attend the talk on 'Science Fiction' given by Eric Brown, Tony Ballantyne and Charles Stross. But it was the last item on the agenda at 8:15 p.m, and I didn't want to get home late. Sorry I missed it, guys.

All attendees were given an ARC of Charles Stross' Halting State in their convention pack. I had a chat with Charlie - mostly about the appalling cover art to the US edition of his Saturn's Children and his upcoming signing tour of the US - and then got him to sign the ARC. On which subject... There were no dealers present - other than the redoubtable and near-ubiquitous Elastic Press, NewCon Press and TTA. This was both good and bad. Bad because I might have been able to pick up a few hard-to-find titles from the wants list. Good because it saved me money. The event organisers were selling books by the attending authors, and there was a signing session arranged about halfway through the day. But there was a poor choice of titles available, and they were pretty much all massmarket paperbacks. But then alt.fiction isn't a convention per se, and that's reflected in the attendees. This was particularly obvious during John Jarrold's talk. Alt.fiction is aimed at unpublished writers, and in that respect the many talks provide some very useful and helpful information. And, of course, an opportunity to network.

Annoyingly, I forgot to take my camera along - although one or two people were happy I'd left it behind. I can't think why... But, despite that, despite the lack of dealers, I had a good time, and I'll certainly be attending next year's alt.fiction.