MARC SCOTT ZICREE
Creating Your Own Science Fiction
MARC SCOTT ZICREE has written for most of the major networks and studios, with hundreds of hours of produced credits. He is currently co-writing Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities with Guillermo del Toro for Harper Design and writing, directing, and producing SPACE COMMAND.
I still remember the first time I saw The Twilight Zone. I was eight years old, down in the garage with my stepfather. Two old black-and-white TV sets were propped high on a shelf. One only got picture, the other only sound.
Suddenly, strange images appeared on the silent set on the left, three men inside a spacecraft, landing on an alien planet, finding a wrecked duplicate of their ship and, inside it, incredibly, horribly . . . their own dead bodies.
I didn’t know then that the episode was called “Death Ship,” or that two of the three men were actors named Ross Martin and Jack Klugman, or that the writer was Richard Matheson, or even the name of the show. And I certainly didn’t dream that I was beginning a journey that would span more than forty years of my life and lead to my career as a writer, director, and producer in television. Nonetheless—I was hooked.
I grew up watching The Twilight Zone, along with Star Trek and the original Outer Limits. They formed much of who I am, my beliefs and what drives me, my moral sense, my ethics.
When I got out of college, I knew I wanted to be a writer working in TV, but was challenged how to learn that trade and learn it well. I decided that by studying how a classic show was made, I might find how to emulate it.
I started looking for articles or books about The Twilight Zone and found there were virtually none available. I realized I would have to write the book I wanted to read. So at age twenty-two, I started writing The Twilight Zone Companion, a book that is still in print all these years later, with more than half a million copies sold.
Shortly after that I sold my first script, which led to hundreds of hours of produced network shows and my rise from story editor to executive producer. It all started with learning from a great example.
Over the last several decades, I’ve spent a great deal of time contemplating what makes a successful science fiction show. I’ve contributed to some notable ones, including Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Babylon 5, and Sliders. Early in my career I developed Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, a dystopic, live-action children’s show that was actually written for adults and led directly to the creation of Babylon 5.
Beyond this I’ve written numerous science fiction pilots, including “World Enough and Time,” the independent Star Trek episode I made with George Takei that was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Right now, I’m creating SPACE COMMAND. The project was funded by the audience via Kickstarter and will be released as a series of films and half-hour episodes. It’s a bold new adventure, impossible prior to the age of the digital camera, computer editing software, and the Internet.
So how do you go about creating a science fiction show? To begin with, it’s the same as any TV show—it’s about the characters. Whether it’s Kirk, Spock, and McCoy or the characters in Fringe or Doctor Who, you’re essentially creating a surrogate family the audience will want to spend time with on a regular basis.
You also have to tell exciting, well-structured, surprising, and entertaining stories with each episode.
More than that, with science fiction you’re creating an entire universe. If it’s an especially far-reaching and imaginative universe, it can spin off hundreds of stories with dozens of characters, as in the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises.
The trick with creating your own science fiction show is marrying characters and themes you care about with an evocative and believable science fiction landscape. And there has to be an element that’s fresh to it, something we haven’t seen before.
That’s a tall order. So where to start?
First of all, educate yourself as to what’s been done in the genre. That way, you’ll know if the premise of your show is overly familiar, even cliché.
Second, look at characters and situations that intrigue you, get your character voices distinct from each other, and make sure your science (or pseudo-science) seems plausible.
Lastly—and this is crucial—make sure your idea has enough breadth to actually make a series. The way you know this is by seeing how many storylines you can spin off from it. If it won’t last at least a hundred episodes, it’s probably better suited as a movie, or even a novel.
Be mindful too that there are two kinds of TV series now—ones in which each episode stands alone (as with the original Star Trek) and those where there’s a series arc—a larger over-arcing storyline that covers an entire season or number of seasons.
Thanks to the advent of home video, series arcs have become popular and are even desired by the networks. This is a big change from the old days.
Your science fiction premise can be set in the future, the present, the past, or jump around from one time frame to another—even take place on parallel worlds. However, be mindful of production realities and make sure what you’re proposing can be done on a realistic television budget.
A great plus to creating your own science fiction show is that the fan audience tends to be very loyal, and even after the show has left the air it can live on in reruns, books, comic books, you name it. And then of course, like Star Trek, STAR WARS, Doctor Who, and Battlestar Galactica, it can return in ever-newer versions.
Finally—and most important of all—tell your truth. You’re writing about your own life and experience, whatever imaginary cloak you put it in. Authenticity is what resonates with an audience. My dear friend and mentor Ray Bradbury told me always to look inward rather than outside myself for stories. It was good advice. But in reality, everything you are, everything you read, see, hear, experience, is grist for your mill.
Just make sure that what you create has something uniquely yours in it, something you care deeply about and are willing to invest years in bringing to fruition, and you’ll be way ahead of the game.
When I was thirteen, a friend gave me a gift of a trip to the original Star Trek set during filming of the show’s last episode. Now I’m building spaceship sets for SPACE COMMAND. I still feel the same excitement standing on the bridge.
Here’s another thing Ray Bradbury told me, when he was in his eighties: “I have a secret to tell you,” he said, and motioned me close. “I’m thirteen years old.”
It was true. For that’s the age when our sense of wonder is most pure, and he’d kept that intact, nurtured it, safeguarded it. I take that lesson to heart, and I urge you to do so too. Send that thirteen-year-old self into the future, the past, out to the stars and beyond.
It’s an exciting universe . . . and it can be all yours.
EXERCISE
1. Start by thinking of what kind of science fiction show you might want to create. What in the real world excites you, gets you angry? What do you want to comment on? Extrapolate from there.
2. Think of five characters who might be your leads. They can be from real life or other sources, but real life helps. Make them distinctive and different from one another.
3. Put these characters in your science-fiction world. Start generating story ideas, springboards of a sentence or two. Try to generate at least twenty or thirty of these.
4. Read over what you’ve written and come up with five ways to make these ideas fresh and novel, different from what you’ve seen.
5. If you’re particularly daring, outline several of these stories—beginning, middle, and end. These outlines should be no more than five pages each.
6. If you’re really daring, write up a series bible—a concise description of your show, its characters, the world and the storylines, maybe even the series arc. Then write your pilot script. Now you’ve got something you can take out and se
ll. Good luck!
RICHARD BLEILER
Teaching Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers
RICHARD BLEILER is the humanities librarian for the University of Connecticut, where he also teaches a class on the history and development of science fiction. He was editor of Science Fiction Writers and Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror; he was co-author of Science-Fiction: The Early Years and Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years. He was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Best Nonfiction in 2002.
You do not have to like the works you are teaching, but you should respect them, and one of the works I most respect is Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. It is more than fifty years old, and yet it remains vital in an astonishing number of ways. It operates successfully on many levels and should be read by anybody wanting to write or understand American science fiction. It is one of the landmark works of science fiction.
Starship Troopers is first and foremost an exciting and tense adventure novel, and if one takes nothing else from Heinlein’s narrative, this enjoyment from reading a thrilling adventure story should not be underestimated. Nevertheless, Starship Troopers is so much more. It is a statement about the nature and future of humanity; it is a traditional bildungsroman merged with a tendenzroman; and it is a monster story. It is also a remarkable combination of tendentiousness, provocation, and debatable political philosophy that too many students have swallowed whole without first wondering what it is they’re chewing.
When I teach the novel, my classes tend to have two levels: call them understanding and overstanding. It is only through the understanding of the text that the overstanding of it can be reached, and the way I like to begin to reach a common, shared understanding is by requiring as homework a brief—no more than one page—paper on the novel. This paper is not graded and is for them to answer a basic question: What makes the novel science fiction? There are many definitions—by this time in the class we have covered some, as well as discussed the list given in “Science Fiction and This Moment,” the introduction to Istvan Csicsery-Ronay’s The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction—so the students have started to recognize some of the problems inherent in attempting to define the genre.
Next, I do not lecture but instead ask them to describe what they have read, and not simply to summarize the story as it occurs in the novel. Rather, they are to put the novel’s events in chronological order, describing briefly the motivations for action and the results. (At its most elemental, this confirms that they have read the book and not a Wikipedia entry.) In Starship Troopers a description of the narrative is actually fairly difficult, for one of Heinlein’s narrative tricks is akin to making the reader focus on one thing and believe it is significant, while actually diverting attention from the other and more significant issue. In addition, Heinlein cheerfully withholds information: He avoids the dreaded info dump by almost never explaining anything, dropping hints and oblique statements that become important only in retrospect.
The class, forced to gather evidence, fill in gaps, answer questions and make assumptions, becomes embedded in understanding the story at a level that would not be possible if the narrative was linear, spelled out, and explicit. They are encouraged to correct each other but to be polite. It is surprising how few students recognize that Heinlein’s Earth is under what may be seen as a benign military rule, its population divided into two groups, civilians and soldiers. They likewise often fail to recognize that only soldiers can vote in elections, run the country, and teach the class on history and moral philosophy; too often they fail to note that the soldiers tend to regard the civilians as sheep. And too often they have accepted, at face value, the arguments put forward by Mr. Dubois and others during the course of the novel; i.e., “Required: to prove that war and moral perfection derive from the same genetic inheritance. Briefly, thus: All wars arise from population pressure.”
Nevertheless, once a shared level of understanding has been reached, the questions that lead to a critical assessment—the overstanding—can be asked.
Next: linkage and contextualization. The first novel read by the class is Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000—1887, a book whose ideas and proposed solutions provoke discussion and dissension though the narrative is stodgy by today’s standards. I point out that Starship Troopers is as argumentative and contentious as Looking Backward, which generally comes as a surprise to my students before they realize that Heinlein was the superior storyteller with a more contemporary voice. Still, like Bellamy, he was criticizing society and offering solutions to what he perceived as its problems.
Finally, after the novel is finished, I like to give students a piece of relevant criticism. I ask them to read Thomas Disch’s deliberately outrageous “The Embarrassments of Science Fiction” and address the issues Disch raises about science fiction in general and Heinlein in particular. This always generates discussion: The students find themselves having to defend a novel whose ideas and conclusions they do not necessarily accept.
EXERCISE
Read Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.
To deepen your understanding of the book and issues of concern to science fiction writers in general, here are a few questions to consider while reading or after you finish. First, the “whys”:
1. Why are there almost no women visible in Starship Troopers, although the scene at the conclusion of the first chapter and in the recruiting station in the novel’s second chapter leaves no doubt that they are competent and tough enough to serve as starship pilots? What reasons can be extrapolated from the society described by Heinlein?
2. Why does one get one chance only to serve as a soldier in Heinlein’s society? Why is there no room for personal growth, individual maturation, and second chances?
3. Why does Heinlein’s first chapter include a lengthy passage that calls to mind a human in the birth canal? What is being born here? If it is birth, what matures during the course of the novel?
4. Why are the soldiers fighting the “formics”?
5. What conclusions can be drawn from Johnnie’s revelation that Tagalog is his native language? Why is this intriguing piece of information not given at the beginning of the book? (I present Samuel Delany’s reaction upon this revelation which was, essentially, “Oh my, this isn’t one more novel featuring white Americans saving the universe. The main character is brown—like me!”)
And then there are the questions that address the philosophy presented in the novel:
6. Mr. Dubois heaps scorn on the idea that “violence never settles anything,” arguing that violence has settled more issues in history than any other factor. Is this true? Is violence the only way a conflict can be settled? If so, what does this say about humanity? And if you disagree, figure out where Mr. Dubois was using “weasel words” and undermine his argument.
7. Mr. Dubois argues that there are no unalienable rights and takes exception to the phrase, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. His counterarguments show that he equates physical laws with political laws. He likewise deconstructs the phrase juvenile delinquent, arguing that there is no such thing, that they are only juvenile hoodlums. Is his argument valid?
8. And of course, the statement about “all wars arising from population pressure.” I challenge my students (and you) to duplicate Johnnie’s supposed research. Can you find demonstrable exceptions to the rule?
Do you think Heinlein believed his own arguments? Or was he just playing with ideas? After all, in science fiction playing with ideas is encouraged.
I hope that examining this work shows that you can write a sophisticated novel of ideas and still make it exciting and worthy of respect.
BRIANNA WINNER
Understanding Yourself Better Through Creative Writing
BRIANNA WINNER and her identical twin sister Brittany are America’s youngest multiple-award-winning authors and writing teachers. Their first novel, The Strand P
rophecy, became a national best seller on their thirteenth birthday. They have now written four novels, a graphic novel, and a writing book. They were recognized as prodigies by The World Council for Gifted and Talented Children.
Do you remember playing pretend when you were a child? Though you did not realize it at the time, those pretend games helped you better understand your environment and yourself. Storytelling is an important part of being human. It is instinctual, a way to understand why the world works the way it does, and a way to overcome our fears and problems. As we get older, some channel that creativity into art, acting, directing, and music. But storytelling is embedded into our lives, whether visually or in words.
Every writer consciously or unconsciously puts elements of themselves and their lives into their work. After all, you create your ideas, and your ideas are a combination of everything you experience and dream about. It may be the places you have been to or wish you could go, the way you wish the world was, or the person you strive to be. We have come to realize that story ideas are a reflection of events and feelings we experienced in our lives.
I have loved storytelling my entire life. When the other children stopped playing pretend, I chose to continue. I loved storytelling too much to let it go. My identical twin sister and I created worlds filled with science fiction characters, planets, and rich history. Our characters and story arcs were complex and compelling. We could spend all day completely content just dreaming about our stories and the worlds we created. Those stories helped us to cope with the harshness of school. Storytelling was not only our passion, but our escape.
Storytelling helped me filter through emotions and lessons I learned by trial and error. Through it I could explore the person I wanted to become and the parts of myself I wanted to change. It gave me an escape from my problems and a way to empower myself to overcome them. Playing pretend as a child and storytelling as an adult are not that different, but what is different is your age. The biggest difference is when you are older you write your stories down. Essentially every author plays pretend.
Now Write! Page 18