How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (8 page)

Ramdrives. Long before the personal computer culture taught us to use the term
RAM drive
for a virtual disk in volatile memory, science fiction readers were introduced to the ramscoop stardrive, or ramdrive, that solved

part of the fuel problem. Instead of carrying fuel enough to handle all of a ship’s acceleration, a ramship would use conventional fuel to get up to a certain speed, then deploy a huge network like a funnel in front of it, to scoop up the loose matter that is everywhere in space. This matter would then be used as fuel, so that acceleration could continue without having to carry all the fuel along.

There are theoretical problems-the efficient use of the loose interstellar “dust,” some structure for the net that isn’t so heavy that the matter it collects can’t provide energy enough to accelerate it, the fact that at velocities far below lightspeed the interstellar dust stops being harmless dust and starts being extremely dangerous and explosive debris that seriously harms any ship traveling that fast. But the ramdrive is fun and semiplausible, and it allows you to have a starship that isn’t the size of your average asteroid.

Time dilation.
Time dilation space travel is a sort of middle path. With this set of rules, your starship can travel at a speed so close to the speed of light (say, 99.999% of lightspeed) that, while you don’t turn into pure energy, you get from point A to point B at almost the speed of light. Relativity theory suggests that time aboard an object traveling at that speed would be compressed, so that while an outside observer might think thirty years had passed, people on the ship would only have lived through a few hours or days or weeks.

This allows you to get people from world to world without generation ships or cryo-travel. The travelers who reach the new planet have clear memories of their home world. But they won’t be particularly eager to get back, because, while to them it has been only a few weeks since they left home, back there it has been thirty years. Anybody they left behind has aged a whole generation or died. And if they turned around and went back immediately, they would return home to find that someone who was twenty when they left is now eighty years old. To all intents and purposes, it’s still a one-way voyage-but one that allows the travelers to arrive with their society intact, relatively unchanged by the voyage.

Still, the characters will have been cut off from anyone they knew and loved. This suggests that either the travelers will be going through some degree of grief or they will have had no close friends or family on their previous world; in either case, this will have a lot to do with how you characterize them

And pretend not to know that to a ship traveling at such a high percentage of lightspeed, space dust would strike them like intense gamma radiation. Just say that they use a half-mile-thick layer of crushed asteroid as shielding, or that they have a force field that shields them from the radiation. Or don’t say anything at all-time dilation stories are such a staple in science fiction that you really don’t have to apologize for them anymore.

The ansible.
I first ran across this variation on time dilation in the works of Ursula K. LeGuin, and found it one of the most useful devices in space travel. In essence, the ansible is a device that allows you to
communicate
instantaneously, regardless of distance. Thus travelers can go on one-way time-dilation voyages, yet still report to and receive instructions from people on the home planet.

This is enormously convenient if you want to have a fairly unified interstellar society and yet don’t want people hopping from planet to planet the way some people commute by air from Boston to New York. A space voyage remains an irrevocable decision, cutting you off from everyone you leave behind, yet the whole interstellar society can share literature, politics, news-anything that can be transmitted by ansible. It’s as if the Pilgrims could have communicated with England by radio, but still had to do all their traveling in small, dangerous, unhealthy wooden ships.

As science, of course, this is pure nonsense-yet it is so useful that many of us have used some variation on it. After all, we’re not trying to predict the future, only to tell a story in a strange place!

Warp speed.
I haven’t even touched on the silliest of space travel rules the one used in the
Star Trek
universe, where the speed of light is no more a barrier than the speed of sound, and you only have to persuade Scotty in the engine room to really step on the gas to get to four, eight, ten times the speed of light. This sort of stardrive shows such contempt for science that it’s best to reserve it for light adventures or comic stories-or, of course,
Star Trek
novelizations.

In fact, unless you’re actually writing a
Star Trek
novel (which means you must already have a contract with the publisher licensed by Paramount Pictures) or are deliberately trying to be funny,
never
refer to “warp speed” in your fiction. It’s not only bad science, it also pegs you instantly as a writer who knows science fiction only through
Star Trek.
Beware of
anything
that makes non-Trekkie readers think of
Star Trek.
That’s the

equivalent of appling for a position as a physics professor with a resume that lists your training as “Watched every episode of Mr. Wizard.” You may actually know something, but it’ll be hard to get anyone to take you seriously long enough to find out.

What the Rules Can Do for You

All this attention to space travel, and your story- docsn t have a single scene aboard the ship! Do you really have to go through all this?

Yes-in your head, or perhaps in your outline. Just enough time to make your decisions about the rules and then make sure your whole story doesn’t violate them. But your
reader
doesn’t have to go through all that with you. Once you’ve decided that you’re using a difficult, dangerous hyperspace where the emergence points can shift by parsecs without warning, then all you have to do is drop some reference into the story-perhaps a single sentence, like this:

“It was a perfect flight, which is to say that they didn’t emerge from the jump through hyperspace in the middle of a star or heading straight for an asteroid, and even though everybody puked for days after the jump, nobody died of it.”

That’s it. That’s all. No more discussion about the mechanics of starflight. But your readers will understand why none of the travelers is eager to leave the planet, and why it’ll be quite a while before another ship comes. And now, with the rules established, you’re free to do things like having your viewpoint character think of someone else this way:

Back at Moonbase, Annie had thought Booker looked pretty good,

thought he might be worth getting to know a little better. But after the hyperjump she had had to clean up his vomit while he whimpered and cried in the corner. He didn’t emerge from his hysteria till they were in orbit around Rainbird. Annie knew that Booker couldn’t help it, that a lot of people reacted that way to the jump, but then, she couldn’t help it, either, that it was impossible to respect him anymore after that.

Maybe this relationship will be important in your story; maybe it won’t. But if you didn’t
know
that people puke a lot after the hyperspace jump, if you hadn’t worked out the rules in advance, then you couldn’t have given Annie this memory and this aspect to her relationship with Booker. The rules you establish don’t limit you; they open up possibilities.
Know the rules, and the rules will make you free.
Time Travel

You have to go through the same process with time travel. Without going into the same detail, let me just list some of the possible variations on time travel.

1. If you go back in time, you can make any changes you want in the past and you’ll continue to exist, because the very act of traveling in time takes you outside the timestream and removes you from the effects of changes in history. (See Asimov’s
The End of Eternity.)

2. If you go back in time, you
can
make changes that destroy your own societyso time travel is a closely guarded secret, and those who travel in time are only the most skilled and trusted people. Perhaps they are sent to rescue great works of art that have been lost for centuries. Or perhaps, as in John Varley’s classic “Air Raid” (published under the pseudonym Herb Boehm), these time travelers are rescuing people from airplanes that are about to crash or ships that are about to go down with no survivors, so they can force these healthy people to colonize planets and save humanity from extinction in a hideously polluted future.

3. If you go back in time far enough, any changes you make won’t have major effects in your own time, because history has a kind of inertia and tends to get itself back on track. So if you kill Napoleon as a baby, France still has an earlynineteenth-century empire and a protracted war with England, and by 1900 everything is right back where it would have been.

4. If you go back in time, you are only
able
to make changes that have no longterm effects, since any universe in which you change your own future could not exist.

5. When you go back in time, you’re invisible and unable to affect anything. But you can
watch-so
there’s quite a tourist business.

6. Time travel consists of going back into the
mind
of somebody living in the past, seeing events through his eyes. He doesn’t know you’re there. (But, in Carter Scholz’s brilliant short story “The Ninth Symphony of Ludwig von Beethoven and Other Lost Songs,” the presence of time-traveling observers in Beethoven’s mind drove him mad and eventually killed him, stopping him from writing his greatest works.

The time travelers never realized what they were doing, however, because with history altered, they “knew” that Beethoven had never written any such symphonies after all.)

7. Time travel consists of going back into your own mind at an earlier stage in your life, able to observe but not to act. Or, in a variation, you can act, but then your youthful self will have no memory of what you did while your future self was in control. I used that one in a love story called “Clap Hands and Sing.”

8. Time travel consists of observation only, like watching a hologram or a movie. You aren’t actually there, and perhaps you aren’t altogether sure that what you’re seeing is the real past. Maybe it’s never the same way twice! (I actually don’t remember seeing a story about that-feel free to use that set of rules and see what develops.)

9. Your body remains inside the time-travel device, but a semi-real body is assembled for you in the past; your consciousness remains with that simulacrum until it dies or fades, whereupon you wake up and emerge from the machine. In a story called “Closing the Timelid,” I had a group of thrillseekers using such a machine in order to go through repeated deaths by malting their simulacra commit suicide.

Do you get the idea? Each one of these sets of rules opens up a whole new range of story possibilities-and trust me, there are hundreds of variations that nobody’s tried vet, or that have many, many stories left in them.

The Rules of Magic

In workshops and conferences over the past decade, I’ve seen groups of writers and readers come up with hundreds of ways that magic might work within a fantasy society. But the basic idea is only the beginning. With magic, you must be very clear about the rules. First, you don’t want your readers to think that anything can happen. Second, the more carefully you work out the rules, the more you know about the limitations on magic, the more possibilities you open up in the story.

Let’s take, as an example, one of the ideas that commonly crops up in the fantasy part of my thousand-ideas sessions: The price of magic might be the loss of parts from the human body. It’s simple, it’s painful, and it’s grotesque to imagine-sounds like a great idea to me. And there are as many variations here as there were with time travel. Here are several different ways you might turn this idea into a useful magic system:

1. When the magic user casts a spell, he loses bits off his own body, always starting with the extremities. He’s never sure quite how much he’s going to lose. Inevitably, however, missing fingers or hands or feet or limbs begin to be taken in society as a sign of great power-so that young people who wish to seem formidable pay to have fingers and, sometimes, limbs removed, with scars artfully arranged to look like those that magicians have. It’s hard to tell who really has power and who only seems to. (Your story might be about somebody who refuses to mutilate himself; he’s universally regarded as a powerless coward. Which, in fact, he is-until there comes a time when a spell is needed to save his city, a spell so powerful that only a person with his entire body intact can cast it-and the spell will use up all his limbs at once. Does he do it? If so, why?)

2. The magic user must actually cut off a part of his own body, or have it cut off, casting the spell while the bone is being incised. The longer he endures the pain and the larger the section of his body being removed, the more power he obtains. A whole profession of Removers would spring up, people skilled at the excruciatingly slow removal of limbs, using drugs that, while they don’t dull the pain, do allow the magician to remain lucid enough to perform the spell. (Here’s a chance for an interesting twist on a science fiction staple: a future society devoted to “harmless” recreational drugs. Why not have a Remover who goes into the underground apothecary trade, selling the drugs to people who just want the heightened mental effects? What will the magicians do to him then?)