In search of the story

I've been revising some of my short stories this week, with a view to getting them submitted to magazines.  And I've been taking the magazines' advice and reading what they publish.

Some of my researches have really surprised me. If I'm reading a story about the end of the world, I want to know something about how the world ends, and how the characters survive it.  Instead what I got was a story about a girl delivering books to another girl, going home and taking a suicide pill.  It left me with a sharp intake of breath.  it violated one of the basic rules of storytelling, which is that the main protagonist should survive their ordeal.  

I've read stories of people with symbiotic aliens on their shoulders whose minds and sense of being don't seem to be affected by the presence of the creature at all.  I've read stories that begin with a long discourse on an obscure (invented?) word, but never go on to explain what it means.  That story read more like a dictionary entry than thrilling fiction.  Or perhaps it was supposed to be a bogus history text about this... God?  I really wasn't sure. The author hadn't made it clear.  Then there was the promising story about nanobots cleaning up a radioactive city.  The biotech ideas were good, but it turned out to be far too long, and degenerated into a technical manual for the recycling process.  Somewhere, the story got lost in the midst of the tech.

All this has left me wondering whether this is why I've had trouble selling my stories.  The stories I've read fall into two types.  One set fall into the hard SF mould, and don't seem to worry too much about characters or their fictive journey.  The other set seem to be the other extreme, stream of consciousness ramblings in search of a story.

My stories sit slap bang in the middle.  I have some science and tech, but usually not enough to classify the story as hard SF.  The story is about characters who use that tech, and about its consequences.  And I might be old-fashioned, but I like my stories to have a spine, a recogniseable sequence of events, a beginning, middle and end.  

Hmm. I wonder what reception I'll get when I send the latest batch of short stories out to magazines.

How much science do you need?

People who don't read SF often have the idea that the genre is full of scientific theories that are hard to understand.  In reality that often isn't the case.

Hard SF built around the invention of some new tech is the sort of story outsiders to the genre think of, but a great deal of SF is soft, focusing on cultures, alternate histories, and social structures of societies.

In our own lives most of us don't know how our car's engine management system or our computers work, we just use the tech.  This will be so in the future too.  And that gets us off the hook as writers. We need only describe what future tech does without knowing how to design it in detail.

For Panthera : Death Spiral, I needed to know about DNA and epigenetics, and about the workings of the thymus gland.  I learned enough to know how many genes a human body has, and how genes are controlled by the epigenome, but I won't be doing any gene splicing any day soon.

The trick is to know enough to be able to work out a plausible plot for your story.  In Panthera : Death Spiral the plot revolves around discovering who is stealing kingcat thymus cells, and why they need them.  And that took me into examining DNA.  But I couldn't give you a detailed breakdown of what gene does what.  I don't need that level of detail.

Popular science books usually give me enough knowledge of the topic, so do TV programmes.  In England we have excellent wildlife filmmaking, courtesy of the BBC.  And programmes like Horizon tackle serious science topics in an accessible way, providing a valuable overview of complex cosmology or biological theories, or the state of AI research.

Even popular science summaries can be enough to throw up story ideas, or confirm that the one I'm writing has plausible science or tech in it.  And that's all I need as a soft SF writer.