How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (10 page)

New Words for New Meanings

Nothing is more tacky than to have a bunch of foreign-sounding words thrown into a story for no better reason than to have something that sounds foreign. James Blish called such needlessly coined words “shmeerps.” If it looks like a rabbit and acts like a rabbit, calling it a
shmeerp doesn’t
make it alien.

If mugubasala means “bread” then say
bread! Only
use the made-up stuff when it is used for a concept for which there is no English word. If your viewpoint character
thinks that
mugubasala is nothing but bread, then later discovers that it is prepared through a special process that releases a drug from the native grain, and that drug turns out to be the source of the telepathic power that the natives are suspected of having, then you are fully justified in calling the bread mugubasala. It really is different, and deserves the added importance that a foreign name bestows.

In Portuguese there’s a common idiomatic expression based on the verb dar, to give. You ask someone, “Sera que da p’ra entrar?” and he answers, “Nao da.” A literal transation would be “Will it give to enter?” and the answer means “It doesn’t give.” But that conveys none of the sense. When you say “Does it give?” to do something, it means “Is it possible? Is it proper? Is it right? Will it be resisted? Is it safe?” Yet not one of these terms actually conveys the precise meaning. In fact, in English there is no word or expression that conveys that exact meaning.

Your invented languages
should have
concepts that just can’t be translated, not so that you can toss in cool-sounding phrases like “Hlobet mesh nay beggessahn dohlerem,” but rather so that you can develop-and the reader can understand-the cultural and intellectual differences between cultures.

But don’t leave those phrases untranslated. The commonly accepted way to handle this is to repeat the foreign phrase in English immediately afterward-provided your viewpoint character understands the language.

“Eu so queria tomar cafezinho,” I said. All l wanted was a little coffee.

Indeed, you never actually have to use the foreign language itself to convey the same effect. After all, presumably you’re translating
all
the dialogue and narration of all your stories that aren’t set in contemporary Englishspeaking society- so why arbitrarily choose a few words to leave untranslated, especially if the word isn’t important to the story?

“God give me strength not to kill you for having seen my ugliness, ” he said to me.

1 blinked once, then realized that he was speaking Samvoric and had given me the ritual greeting between equals. 1 hadn’t heard Samvoric in a long time, but it still sounded more natural to me than Common Speech. “God forgive me for not blinding myself at once after having

beheld your glory,” 1 said.

Then we grinned and licked each other’s cheeks. He tasted like sweat. On a cold day like this, that meant he’d either been drinking or working hard. Probably both.

There’s not one made-up word in the whole paragraph (except for the name of the language, of course, and yet you definitely get the idea that you’re dealing with a foreign language -a whole foreign culture, in fact.

(If you
are
using a known foreign language, by the way, take the time and effort to get it right. Among your readers there will always be someone who speaks that language like a native. If you get it wrong, those readers lose faith in you- and rightly so. Wherever you
can
be truthful, you
should
be truthful; if your readers can see that you’re acting by that credo, they’ll trust you, and you’ll deserve their trust. But if they catch you faking it, and doing it so carelessly that you can easily be caught, they’ll figure that if the story wasn’t worth much effort to you, it shouldn’t be worth much to them, either. They may still like the story; but you have blunted the edge of their passion

Can the Human Mouth Pronounce It?

Be careful, too, that the language you invent is pronounceable for your Englishspeaking readers. Words or names that are mere collections of odd letters, like
xxyqhhp
or
h’psps’t
are doubly dumb, first because they constantly distract the reader and force him to withdraw from the story and think about the letters on the page, and second because even strange and difficult languages, when transliterated into the Roman alphabet, will follow Roman alphabetic conventions.

If you doubt it, look at how languages as diverse as Chinese, Navaho, Arabic, Greek, and Quechua are represented in Roman characters. They’re meaningless to those who don’t speak the language, and when you pronounce them as written, they won’t sound much like the real language, either. But you can pronounce them, after a fashion. And therefore they don’t distract from the story, but rather help the world of the story seem more real and complete.

This especially applies to alien and foreign names. You want that name to be an instant label for a character or place-but you must remember that it can’t be a merely visual label. Even though most of your readers don’t move their lips, you must take into account the fact that many (if not most) readers have a strong oral component to their reading. In our minds, we’re reading aloud, and if we run into a word or name that can’t be pronounced, it stops us cold. The visual symbols-the letters-are continuously translated into the sounds of the spoken language in our minds. And for those of us who read that way, names like Ahxpxqwt are perpetual stumbling blocks.

Subsets of English

Most of the time, though, the made-up languages in your story will all be English. Or, rather, a subset of English.

Every community develops jargon-words that have meaning within the context of that community, but have no meaning, or different meanings, to outsiders. Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange is an extreme example of this, as the reader is almost overwhelmed by the strange and at-first-incomprehensible slang of the street hoodlums. Yet so artfully designed is his future street slang that in fact you grasp the meanings of most expressions intuitively, and quickly learn the others from context. Within a few pages you think you’ve been speaking this slang all your life.

But Burgess is better than most of us-his invented slang is so effective

because he actually understands the many mechanisms by which slang develops: circumlocution, euphemism, rhymes, irony, foreign borrowings, and many, many more. When he had his characters use the word
horrorshow
for “really neat,” he was, in part, following the same path that, years later, led to the use among American black youths of the word
bad
to mean “really neat.”

You don’t have to go to Burgess’s extremes in order to use made-up languages effectively-indeed, you probably shouldn’t. Invented languages are a lot more fun to make up than they are to wade through in a story. Most of the time, you’ll use just a few terms to imply a jargon or slang or a cant, just as you use only a few phrases to establish that two characters are speaking a known foreign language.

5. Scenery

This is the part that most people think of when they talk about world creation: coming up with a star system and a planet and an alien landscape. You calculate the diameter and mass of the planet, its periods of rotation and revolution, its distance from the sun, its angle of inclination, any satellites it might have, the brightness of the sun, its age.

The result is a very precise set of measurements: the surface gravity; the surface temperature; whether or not there’s an atmosphere and, if there is one, what it’s made of and what the prevailing winds are like; the climate in various regions of the planet; its oceans and continents (if any); tides; and, finally, the likelihood of life and the kind of life it would have.

The result can range from fairly simple things-low-gravity planets with very tall trees and animals; fast-spinning planets with high winds and very short day-night cycles; planets that don’t rotate at all, so that life is only possible in a very narrow band-to complex systems that give rise to a whole novel’s-worth of possibilities.

A couple of examples. Robert Forward’s novel
Dragon’s Egg
came from a very simple proposal: What kind of life might emerge on the surface of a neutron star? The result was one of the best pure-science novels ever written, in which the coming of an exploratory starship from Earth, first seen as a light in the sky, gives rise to the first stirrings of intelligence and curiosity among the rudimentary life forms on the neutron star’s surface. Yet because the star spins so fast and time flows so swiftly for these flat, heavy creatures, by the time the human starship actually arrives, these

aliens we inadvertently created have already developed spaceflight and have advanced past our primitive technological level.

Indeed, Forward is the epitome of the “hard” science fiction writer. Himself a physicist of some note, Forward’s approach to fiction is almost entirely from the scientific angle. Though he’s a fine storyteller, the story is always the servant of the scientific idea.

And for a large group of readers and writers of science fiction, this is the only correct approach to the field. Their preference is for the hard sciences: physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology. They consider zoology and botany to be rather suspect, and as for the “sciences” of sociology, psychology, anthropology, and archaeology, it is to laugh-to them, the social sciences are just subsets of history, an art more literary than evidentiary, speculative rather than measurable.

To hear some hard-sf people talk, you’d think they invented science fiction and all these writers of anthropological or literary or adventure sf are all Johnny-comelatelies. Alas, it is not so-anthropological and literary and adventure sf all pre-date hard sf. But for a long time, starting with John W. Campbell’s editorship of Astounding magazine, the hard stuff, the stories that took science very, very seriously, were the very best work being published in the field. The cutting edge.

Today the cutting edge has moved on-it always does-but more than any other kind of science fiction, hard sf has maintained a core of loyal supporters. Analog magazine, while no longer the leading publication when award time comes around, still has a larger circulation than any of the other fiction-only magazines, even though its stories fall into a very narrow subset of the field. Indeed, Analog seems to be the only magazine that regularly publishes formula stories, but the formulas work within the hard-sf tradition:

1. Independent thinker comes up with great idea; bureaucrats screw everything up; independent thinker straightens it all out and puts bureaucrats in their place. (This story appeals to scientists and their fans because it is a reversal of the pattern in the real world, in which scientists generally prosper according to their ability to attract grant money from bureaucrats, a relationship that forces scientists, who see themselves as an intellectual elite, into subservience.)

2. Something strange is happening; independent thinker comes along and after many false hypotheses, finally discovers the surprising answer.

(This formula is a reenactment of the scientific method, but endowed with far more drama than scientists ever experience in real life.)

3. A new machine/device/discovery is being tested; something goes wrong and it looks like everybody’s going to die; then, after mighty effort,, either everybody dies (tragedy) or everybody lives (happy ending).

Under the editorship of Stanley Schmidt, this approach seems to be inexhaustible, and it is impossible to argue with Analog’s circulation figures compared to the other sf-only magazines. However, while the hard-sf audience remains loyal, the rest of the field has passed on by. The only stories to rise out of Analog and attract attention in the field at large are the ones that either don’t follow these formulas or transcend them.

What separates the best hard-sf writers from the run-of-the-mill ones is the fact that while the ordinary guys usually invent the scenery of their created world and maybe work up a good evolutionary track for the life forms there, they then resort to cliches for everything else. Characters, societies, events-all are taken straight out of everything else they’ve ever read. That’s why formulas are resorted to so often.

That’s why one of the most annoying things about Analog fiction-annoying to me, at least-is the way that most stories there show little knowledge of fundamental human systems. Writers who wouldn’t dream of embarrassing themselves with a faulty calculation of atmospheric density don’t even notice when their characterswhether scientists, government leaders, or gas station attendants; men or women; young or old - all talk and act and relate with other people like smart-mouth schoolboys.

The irony is that the prevalence of bad fiction in the hard-sf subgenre has led many to think that hard science fiction, by its nature, must be bad. Indeed, some of the great writers in the field, who first became famous during the heyday of Campbellian hard science fiction in the 1940s and 1950s, have suffered a bit of tainting by association with their supposed successors in hard sf in recent years.