The right degree of familiarity

It's always a challenge when we're writing SF with an unfamiliar culture and tech to get across the story to the reader.  The characters who inhabit that world know what a whergleflump is, and what it does.  But the reader, looking in on their world, doesn't.  This is the challenge of providing the right degree of familiarity with the world for the reader so that he or she doesn't get lost in it.

We have to balance the need to explain what a piece of tech does, or what a culture believes, with the requirement for the characters to just exist in their world. You or I don't go around every day noticing the telephone sat on our side table at home, or thinking about our laptop, except when we want to use it.  Those things just exist in our world, as tools for our use.  And so it will be with the tech of the future.  The characters who live there won't bat an eyelid twice at the fusion reactor in their neighbourhood.

How do we explain things without resorting to the dreaded "As you know, Professor," info-dump in dialogue?  One very common device is to use the "idiot abroad" mechanism, the stranger in town who doesn't know either, and needs things explained to him/her.  That gives the reader a chance to explain puzzling things, hopefully in swift-moving bits of dialogue while the characters are doing something.

It sometimes seems to me that SF authors get away with bamboozling their readers far too much.  They even get rave reviews for how difficult their books are to understand.  Stuff that.  Call me old-fashioned, but if you set out your stall as a storyteller, I damned well want you to tell me a story.  All of it, with enough detail so that I can understand it.

After all, we choose to become storytellers.  Nobody forces us to write.  So I want you to tell me stories I can understand.  I want you to get the balance right between familiarity and strangeness and the unknown.  That is the art of the accomplished SF storyteller.

Making the impossible possible

The art of writing speculative fiction is the art of making the impossible possible.  Which is what I've been doing this week with my re-write of Jade.  The original story is over fifteen years old.  I wanted to create a sentient planet that communicates with my heroine.  Plenty of sentient planets exist in SF, one of my favourites being Anne McCaffrey's Petaybee.  But Anne doesn't try to explain how that planet became sentient.  She merely states that it must have been a side-effect of the terraforming process.

When I started my re-write of Jade I decided I wanted to try and explain the planet's sentience as far as possible in terms of known science.  And this is where the big difference lies from that original draft.  My knowledge of the science and procedures I needed to know was extremely sketchy fifteen years ago.  I didn't have easy Internet access then, it was before the era of broadband in the UK.  Researching the many and diverse topics I needed to know to make the planet work was near-impossible then.  And some of the science I've appropriated for the story, like crystal storage mediums for computers and DNA computing, didn't even exist back then.

Fifteen years ago it wasn't easy to research submarine diving procedures, how CDs were made, or how a planet's thermohaline circulation works.  Now all that information is readily available on-line.  Also in that period the depths to which such submarines can dive has extended enormously.  We've now explored the deepest places in our oceans.  We've discovered the communities of animals that congregate around the scalding water given off by black smokers.  And we used to think, before discovering the creatures who live down there, that all life needed sunlight to survive.

Being able to easily access all this knowledge has meant I've been able to deliver on the challenge I've set myself to make the impossibility of Jade possible.  I know how the planimal and ocean exchange data, and I know how the ocean writes that data into its Fire Crystal storage centres.  There are a few things that have defeated me, one of which is working out how the ocean retrieves its stored memories.  But it turns out that researchers don't really know how humans retrieve their stored memories either, so I'm not going to worry about that.

The other thing I can't explain is how heroine Kaath can communicate with the planimal and ocean telepathically.  Part of it is her unique genetics, but the other half is pure science fiction.  And I am writing fiction after all, so I feel well satisfied with what I have achieved in making the impossible possible.

An excess of navel gazing

Sometimes I get frustrated with science fiction books.  I love the genre, but not the affectedness with which some authors write in it.  As well as being a repository for the most startling new ideas, it can also descend into a place for navel gazing.

I read one such book this week. It explored the politics of an empire through the eyes of one of its citizens.  The story was supposed to be an adventure of this main character travelling out to a solar system  to discover why the gate had been shut down there.  On the face of it, the potential for a great deal of conflict, and action.

We're always told as writers that first person is more immediate, that it brings the reader more closely into the story.   But this was the only writer I've known who could use first person in a distancing way.  Somehow, the character was narrating the action at a distance, standing back and observing it, even when she was part of it.

This character came over as unemotional, yet she was motivated enough to take sides against a divided ruler.  But the worst thing for me was the lack of passion in the story.  She did what she did because she was ordered to, by a ruler with such a complete hold on power that to defy her would be impossible.  And without the power to act, all a character can do is gaze at their navel.

It's this navel-gazing that irritates me about so much SF work.  Every set of submission guidelines I read for an SF magazine always says that they want character-driven stories, they want people doing something with the tech a writer invents.  And yet I still see far too much navel-gazing there.  Not so much character-driven as character yawn-inducing.

Twenty first century heroines

I love writing speculative fiction because it allows me to visualise worlds and cultures very different from my own broken society. The clue's in the name : speculative fiction.  SF should speculate about the future, or an alternative past, dream of something better than today.

Which is why it irritates me to hell when women throw away the wonderful gifts and freedom that working in the genre offers to reproduce the present-day's sexy and romantic cultural brainwashing. I don't find the domestic sphere in the least bit interesting, and I spend as little time there as I can.  I don't want to read about continuations of today's controlling nuclear family structure in SF.  I don't want to read stories which assume all women are maternal.  I want to read stories that show women accepting their diversity, being proud of their choices to live independently, and unburdened by the sort of emotional rubbish most women take on today.

I've recently sent off a story to a competition told from the viewpoint of a female security commander responsible for protecting a bank of artificial wombs.  I've extrapolated today's falling human fertility to the point where IVF reproduction and growth in artificial wombs has become the norm.  But the beauty of writing speculative fiction is that I can imagine what wider changes this would have on women.

I decided they would be far-reaching.  Children produced in artificial wombs would be more closely monitored for abnormalities. Eventually the society would require foetuses to be scanned, and defective ones terminated well before birth.  But this change would also trigger major cultural shifts too.   I think most women would see recreational sex as useless.  Perhaps the cultural emphasis will shift, and the "sex is good" mantra will die out.

Which brings me back to my story,.  Such a change would inevitably cause a backlash, and here it's neo-mysogynistic men who campaign for a "right" to sex.  They attack the wombs my heroine has to defend.  She has had her ovaries removed and her vagina filled in.  She is one if the first women who can't be physically raped, or get pregnant by mistake.

This is the kind of twenty first century heroine I want to write, and read, about. One who is independent and makes her own decisions, a woman who doesn't alter her appearance or behaviour, or what she does, to please others.  She is a true twenty-first century heroine.