How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (4 page)

And what about horror novels? Many of the works of Stephen King are clearly fantasies-some are even science fiction-and both King and his

audience would be quick to say so. Yet many other works in the horror genre don’t contradict known reality in any way; they fit in the genre because they include perfectly believable events that are so gruesome or revolting that the audience reacts with fear or disgust.

Still, despite its inadequacies, my definition has its uses. For one thing, while it includes many works that really don’t belong in the genre, it doesn’t exclude any works that do. That is, your story may fit my definition and still not be sf or fantasy, but you can be sure that if your story
doesn’t
fit my definition it definitely
isn’t
within the genre.

Even works by established sf or fantasy writers that are included within the genre mainly out of courtesy (or force-fitting by publishers) make some bows, however desultory, toward fitting this definition. They at least offer the
possibility
that the story violates known reality at some point.

More important is the fact that by this definition, speculative fiction is defined
by its milieu.
The world in which the story takes place is the genre boundary line. If a story doesn’t take the reader into an otherwise unknowable place, it isn’t speculative fiction.

One of the primary appeals of all fiction is that it takes the reader into unfamiliar places. But how unfamiliar is it? Like chimps in the savannas of Africa, the human audience for fiction is both afraid of and attracted to strangeness. The chimp, confronted with a stranger who is not openly attacking, will retreat to a safe distance and keep watch. Gradually, if the stranger is doing something interesting, the chimp will be attracted. Curiosity overcomes fear. Or if the stranger’s actions seem threatening, the chimp will flee, call for help, or try to frighten the stranger away, as fear overcomes curiosity.

Human beings also exhibit this love-fear attitude toward strangenessfor instance, we see the fear in racism, the curiosity in the way people slow down to rubberneck as they drive past an accident on the freeway. Our attitude toward strangeness is also a key element in the way we choose the stories we believe in and care about. If a tale we’re reading or watching on the screen is too familiar, it becomes boring; we know the end from the beginning and switch off the set or set the book aside. Yet if it is too unfamiliar, we reject the story as unbelievable or incomprehensible. We demand
some
strangeness, but not too much.

Fortunately, no two people want exactly the same mix of strangeness and familiarity. Some are content to read the same stories over and over again, with only a few cosmetic details changed-or so it appears to those

of us who don’t enjoy gothics or bodice-rippers or teen romances or literary novels about writers who can’t write or painters who can’t paint. Others are forever searching for something new or different, so they can no longer recognize the verities contained in old familiar stories-or so it seems to those of us who don’t enjoy literary experiments like those of Faulkner, Joyce, or Robbe-Grillet.

Speculative fiction by definition is geared toward an audience that wants strangeness, an audience that wants to spend time in worlds that absolutely are not like the observable world around them.

This is not to say that all science fiction and fantasy stories are fresh ventures into the unknown. Many readers, having once discovered a strange world that they enjoy, want to return to that same world again and again, until they’re more familiar with that imaginary place than they are with the real-world town they live in. Many speculative fiction readers who came to the genre in their teens, when they hungered for strangeness and surprise and wonder, continue to read in the genre well into middle age, when they long for the repetitive or familiar-and such readers find no shortage of sf and fantasy that will deliver the right dose of nostalgia.

Yet even the most hackneyed, shopworn science fiction or fantasy tale will feel startling and fresh to a naive reader who doesn’t know the milieu is just like the one used in a thousand other stories. For the intrinsic difference between speculative and real-world fiction is that speculative fiction must take place in an unknowable world. At some point, every science fiction and fantasy story must challenge the reader’s experience and learning. That’s much of the reason why the genre is so open to the experimentation and innovation that other genres reject-strangeness is our bread and butter. Spread it thick or slice it thin, it’s still our staff of life.

Boundary 5: Between Science Fiction and Fantasy

There’s one more boundary that will matter to you-the boundary between science fiction and fantasy. That’s the boundary that I ran into when I tried to sell “Tinker” to Analog.

The division is a real one. There are writers who exclusively write one or the other; there are important differences in the way they are written. There are even differences in the audience-common wisdom has it that more males read science fiction while more females read fantasy. The

result is that the quarrels between fantasy and science fiction often take on overtones of the war between the sexes. And that’s only the beginning of the ugliness. Serious science fiction writers have actually published letters or articles in which they regard fantasy as somehow a threat to “good” science fiction, sometimes because fantasy seems to be crowding science fiction off the bookstore shelves, and sometimes because too many science fiction writers are being as “sloppy” or “sentimental” in their writing as fantasy writers are. Then serious fantasy writers respond with a passionate defense of their own field-and snide remarks about science fiction as an expression of the adolescent male love affair with machines.

I have found these quarrels to be almost as sad as they are funny-like bitter arguments between small children in the same family. Don’t touch me. You hit me first. I hate you. You stink. The fact is that what crowds out good science fiction is bad science fiction; science fiction improves when it borrows the best techniques of fantasy, and fantasy improves when it borrows appropriate techniques from science fiction. I suppose all the arguing does no harm-but it doesn’t enlighten us much, either.

Most of us who write speculative fiction turn with equal ease from fantasy to science fiction and back again. I’ve written both, and have found my fantasy stories to be no easier to write, no less rigorous than my science fiction; nor have I found my science fiction to need any less sense of mythic undertone or any less passionate action than my fantasy stories.

Why, then, do you even need to think about the difference? First, because fantasy and science fiction are separate publishing categories. Most book publishers who offer both kinds of speculative fiction have separate imprints for fantasy and science fiction-or at least put one term or the other on the spine. Some even maintain a separate editorial staff for each genre. And the magazines are keenly aware of the difference between science fiction and fantasy, either because they don’t publish fantasy or because they have to maintain the proper balance between them in order to hold their audience.

Yet in most bookstores, fantasy and science fiction are lumped together in the same group of shelves, alphabetized by author with no attempt to separate one from the other. And they’re right to do so. Those few misguided bookstores that try to have separate science fiction and fantasy sections find that most authors who have books in one section also have books in the other. This can be very confusing for would-be buyers.

“Where’s the latest Xanth novel?” asks the fifteenth kid today. “I found

Piers Anthony’s books in the sci-fi section, but you don’t have any Xanth books there.”

“That’s because the Xanth books are fantasy,” says the patient bookstore clerk. “They’re in the fantasy section.”

“Well that’s stupid,” says the kid. “Why don’t you have his books together?”

And the kid is right. It is stupid. Science fiction and fantasy are one literary community; while there are many who read or write just one, there are many more who read and write both, and it’s foolish to divide them in the store. After all, sf and fantasy have a largely author-driven market. While there are certainly some readers who buy sf or fantasy like Harlequin romances, picking up anything with a spaceship or an elf on the cover, there are many others who search for favorite authors and buy only their works, only rarely branching out to sample books by writers unknown to them. These readers expect to find all of an author’s books together on the shelves. They don’t want “a science fiction novel” or “a fantasy”they want the latest Asimov or Edding, Benford or Donaldson, Niven-and-Pournelle or Hickman-and-Weis.

But there is a time when the division between science fiction and fantasy really matters-and that’s when you’re writing the story.

Here’s a good, simple, semi-accurate rule of thumb: If the story is set in a universe that follows the same rules as ours, it’s science fiction. If it’s set in a universe that doesn’t follow our rules, it’s fantasy.

Or in other words, science fiction is about what could be but isn’t; fantasy is about what couldn’t be.

In the main, this boundary works pretty well. As rational people, we know that magic doesn’t work and superstitions are meaningless. So if magic works in your story, if superstitions come true, if there are impossible beasts like fire-breathing dragons or winged horses, if djinns come out of bottles or mumbled curses cause disease, then you’re writing fantasy.

You must inform your reader as quickly as possible after the beginning of your story whether it’s going to be fantasy or science fiction. If it’s science fiction, and you signal this to the reader, then you have saved yourself enormous amounts of effort, because your reader will assume that all the known laws of nature apply, except where the story indicates an exception.

With fantasy, however, anything is possible. And where anything can happen, who cares what actually occurs? I mean, if your hero can get into

Trouble and then wish his way out, so what? Why worry about him? Why

care?

The truth is that good fantasies carefully limit the magic that’s possible. In fact, the magic has to be defined, at least in the author’s mind, as a whole new set of natural laws that cannot be violated during the course of the story. That is, if at the beginning of the story you have established that your hero can make only three wishes, you better not have him come up with a fourth wish to save his neck right at the end. That’s cheating, and your reader will be quite correct to throw your book across the room and carefully avoid anything you ever write in the future.

All speculative fiction stories have to create a strange world and introduce the reader to it-but good fantasy must also establish a whole new set of natural laws, explain them right up front, and then faithfully abide by them throughout.

Having said all this, I must now point out that there are numerous exceptions. For instance, by this definition time travel stories in which the hero meets himself and stories that show spaceships traveling faster than light should all be classed as fantasy, because they violate known laws of nature-and yet both are definitely classed as science fiction, not fantasy.

Why? One explanation is that people were writing these stories as science fiction before the relevant laws of science were widely known, and so these tales remain science fiction under a sort of grandfather clause. Another explanation is that there was no commercial publishing category of fantasy until the 1960s, so a lot of fantasy came to live quite comfortably within the tent of science fiction and, when the fantasy publishing category came into existence, nobody bothered to move them from one category to the other. They were already conventional.

But to all these explanations I say “bunk.” Time travel and faster-than light (FTL) starships respect the real boundary between fantasy and science fiction: They have metal and plastic; they use heavy machinery, and so they’re science fiction. If you have people do some magic, impossible thing by stroking a talisman or praying to a tree, it’s fantasy; if they do the same thing by pressing a button or climbing inside a machine, it’s science fiction.

So in a sense even science fiction stories have to define the “rules of magic” as they apply in the world of the tale, just as fantasies do. If FTL travel is possible in your science fiction universe, you have to establish that fact early on. If you want time travel, you must either make the story

be
about
time travel or establish immediately that time travel is commonplace in the world of the story.

Still, the difference remains: If a story is perceived as fantasy, the reader must be told as soon as possible the “natural laws” that apply in this fantasy world, whereas if the story is perceived as science fiction, the reader will assume that the natural laws of
this
universe apply until he is told otherwise.

Note that this applies only to the beginning of
the story.
Your “fantasy” might end up with all seeming magic explained away as perfectly natural phenomena; your “science fiction story” might end up being a tale of witchcraft or vampirism in space. Indeed, this is exactly what Sheri Tepper did in her nine-volume
True Game
series. The story deals with people who spend their lives acting out an elaborate chesslike game, discovering and using innate magical abilities like shape-changing. Never mind that by the third volume you learn that these people are all descended from colonists who came to this planet from Earth. Don’t be distracted by the conclusion, which explains in perfectly natural terms where all their seemingly magical powers come from. The story begins with a fantasy feel, so that Tepper has to unfold the laws of the universe very early in the first volume, the way a fantasy writer must.