It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

… it just has to sound plausible

Category Archives: writing


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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.


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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.


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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.)


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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.