Writing Popular Fiction

by Dean Koontz

  While the alternate worlds and the altered past stories are similar in essence, the alternate world background allows a hero from our own Earth and time, the here-and-now, to investigate new places and encounter odd wonders with the familiar perspective of a modern-day American.

  JOURNEY THROUGH A STRANGE LAND STORY

  The last story form is best described as the journey through a strange land story, a great trek and epic quest narrative that is science fiction chiefly by virtue of its setting which is also its plot. The characters in this kind of tale must journey from Point A to Point B, through a landscape as different from our own as a Dali painting is from the reality it represents.

  Jack Vance's Big Planet is the classic of this form, dealing with a huge world many times larger than Earth, and a forty thousand mile journey across an enormous continent harbouring dozens of wildly different societies, terrains, and challenges. In one short paragraph near the beginning of the novel, Vance sets the sense-of-wonder tone upon which all such stories depend, presenting a taste of marvels to come:

  Looking to where Earth's horizon would lie, he could lift his eyes and see lands reaching far on out; pencil lines of various subtle colors, each line a plain or forest, a sea, a desert, a mountain range… He took a step forward, looked over his shoulder. 'Let's go.'

  The landscape over which this trek takes place may be an alien planet, our own Earth in the far future (tens of thousands of years from now and utterly different than we know it today), an alternate world, an Earth based on an altered past, or even our own world in the days of pre-history when the continent of Atlantis (some maintain) was the focal point of civilization. The writer must create one fantastic scene after another, make them credible, and keep the characters moving toward their distant goal, whatever it may be.

  The difference between this story and the alien contact story is simple: in the alien contact story, the alien race and mankind's interaction with it is the center of focus; in the journey through a strange land tale, the landscape itself, rather than any alien race, is the prime focus. Aliens may appear, but they are dwarfed by the land they live in.

  There are, naturally, thousands of science fiction stories, each subtly or obviously different than the last. But I believe that all of them can be categorized in these eight forms, without stretching the point much. Those published works that don't seem to fit any of the eight slots are usually composed of a combination of two or more of the plot types, such as John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, Keith Laumer's The Long Twilight, and my own Beastchild.

  By now, your plot at least sketchily outlined according to the simple plot formula mentioned in Chapter One, your background detailed, you are ready to begin putting the story on paper. It is not sufficient, however, merely to launch into the tale. A science fiction novel requires that certain conditions be met in the first paragraph, others in the first few pages, if the finished work is to be successful. We'll examine these conditions, and how to begin, next.

  Every category novel must hook the reader's attention in the first paragraph and, if possible, in the very first sentence. It must provoke in him an immediate "need to know" how the situation, stated in the first paragraph, will be resolved. Once the narrative hook has been planted, the story may hold the reader's interest in one of two ways:

  (1) the original situation, which caught his attention, turns out to be the major problem of the story and will not be resolved until the conclusion, after many intermediate challenges to the hero; (2) the hook turns out to be a minor problem that leads the hero rapidly into his most important bind. In either case-though (1) is preferable to (2)-the pace must be swift, the danger and the suspense continuous.

  In a science fiction novel, you should not only present a strong narrative hook in the initial paragraph, but also give the reader a glimpse of the background of the story, thereby acclimating him to all the extrapolative detail yet to come. The sooner the reader understands that the story is set on another planet or in the future, the better equipped he will be to follow the plot without confusion.

  Yet this information should not come in a dry, encyclopedic fashion. It should be a part of the narrative, incorporated into the developing story without causing the slightest hesitation in the plot pace. The following selection of first paragraphs should help you to understand how this requirement can be met.

  This, from my own novel, Anti-Man:

  It was really too much to hope for, but we seemed to have lost them. We had jumped from Knoxville to Pierre, South Dakota, from that drab terminal to Bismark, North Dakota, and on to San Francisco. In the City of the Sun, we had walked unknown with our hands in our pockets and our faces open to the sky, feeling less like fugitives than we had any right to, grabbing a day of much needed rest and a moment to collect our thoughts before dashing on. We had spent the day buying gear for the last leg of our escape, eating our first decent meal in two days, and sitting through some atrocious toto-experience film just because it was dark in the theater and, therefore, safer for the two most wanted men in the world. At midnight, we had bought tickets and boarded the next Pole-crossing rocket flight that would take us over Alaska. As the high-altitude craft flashed above Northern California and into Oregon, I took Him into the bathroom at the end of the First Class compartment (fugitives should always travel First Class, for the rich are always too concerned with the way they look to notice anyone else) and locked the door. "Take off your coat and shirt," I told Him. "I want to see that wound."

  Here, the narrative hook is planted in the first sentence, when the reader discovers the narrator and his companion are on the run from someone. The second sentence elaborates that point. The third sentence labels them as "fugitives" which would seem to put them on the wrong side of the law. In the fourth sentence, the reader is thoroughly hooked when he's told that they are the two most wanted men in the world. What are they wanted for? Will they escape their pursuers, or be caught? How badly is the unnamed man wounded? How was he wounded? What complications does his wound pose to their flight? The reader must follow the story to its conclusion to learn some of these answers.

  A wealth of background detail is fitted into that paragraph, preparing the reader for a science fiction setting. That the heroes "jumped" from city to city implies some futuristic transportation system. "Toto-experience film" is a term that implies omni-sensory cinematic experience but which describes nothing available in the present-day world. They travel in a world-spanning rocketship, and such means of travel appears so commonplace that a future setting is indicated. Finally, the use of the capitalized "Him" for the narrator's companion prepares the reader to expect something odd, something presently indefinable. This last, besides being background, functions as a narrative hook too.

  Also from my own work, Dark of the Woods:

  The first bit of trouble came even as they were leaving the starship on Demos's port field; it was a harbinger of worse times ahead.

  The first sentence is also the first paragraph. The narrative hook is the "trouble" mentioned and the statement that it was indicative of all that is to follow. Also in the first sentence, a starship and alien planet are mentioned, immediately clarifying at least the generalities of background for the reader.

  In a science fiction novel, as in no other category, you can delay the appearance of the narrative hook for a few paragraphs, if the exotic background is so strange and intriguing of itself that it acts as the initial grabber to keep the reader going until the problem arises. Such a delay in the plot should never be longer than a page or two.

  As example, consider the first paragraph of Robert Heinlein's Podkayne of Mars:

  All my life I've wanted to go to Earth. Not to live, of course-just to see it. As everybody knows, Terra is a wonderful place to visit but not to live. Not truly suited to human habitation.

  Though the heroine lacks a desperate problem at the outset, she does interest us by casually discounting Earth. Why is Earth a backwater place? Why is it unfit for hab
itation? What has happened between our time and hers? By the time that she explains herself, we have also been narratively hooked.

  Robert Silverberg's excellent novel, Thorns, has a similar beginning in which background acts as a narrative grabber:

  "Pain is instructive," Duncan Chalk wheezed. On crystal rungs he ascended the east wall of his office. Far on high was the burnished desk, the inlaid communicator box from which he controlled his empire. It would have been nothing for Chalk to sail up the wall on the staff of a gravitron. Yet each morning he imposed this climb on himself.

  The crystal rungs, gravitron, and Chalk's own statement make the reader wonder what this future world is like. As he reads a bit more to find out, the plot snares him expertly.

  Here's a third and last example of the background-as-lead-in from another Silverberg novel, Nightwings:

  Roum is a city built on seven hills. They say it was a capital of man in one of the earlier cycles. I did not know of that, for my guild was Watching, not Remembering; but yet as I had my first glimpse of Roum, coming upon it from the south at twilight, I could see that in former days it must have been of great significance. Even now it was a mighty city of many thousands of souls.

  Clearly, Roum is Rome, and the story is set so far in the future that the present is forgotten. Such a background interests the reader, because he wonders how it came to be and how it differs from our world. The mention of guilds, Watching and Remembering, serves to add a note of mystery, of the exotic and curious.

  Ordinarily, you should avoid the use of a "frame" in opening and closing your story. This is a narrative device in which the reader is addressed more directly than in the body of the plot with the intent of setting the story off like a gem in a gold brace. More often than not, the new writer will create a brace of lead, not gold. If you feel you must employ a frame, keep it short and dramatic, as in the following two examples. From The Puppet Masters by Robert Heinlein:

  Were they truly intelligent? By themselves, that is? I don't know and I don't know how we can ever find out.

  If they were not truly intelligent, I hope I never live to see us tangle with anything at all like them which is intelligent. I know who will lose. Me. You. The so-called human race.

  From The Masks of Time by Robert Silverberg:

  A memoir of this sort should begin with some kind of statement of personal involvement, I suppose; I was the man, I was there, I suffered. And in fact my involvement with the improbable events of the past twelve months was great. I knew the man from the future. I followed him on his nightmare orbit around our world. I was with him at the end.

  Once begun, a science fiction novel requires a continuing balance of new plot developments and new background material, especially in the first few chapters. Experience at the keyboard, working on science fiction stories, and a study of the better science fiction writers will help you master this technique. To help you learn what to look for in your own work and the work of others you are studying, let's examine the first chapter of one of my own novels step-by-step, with special attention to how the plot and the background can be developed simultaneously.

  The book is A Darkness in My Soul, published in June, 1972, by DAW Books, a publishing company begun by Donald A. Wollheim, formerly Vice-President of Editorial Policy at Ace Books and a well-respected, long-time editor of science fiction.

  Chapter One

  For a long while, I wondered if Dragonfly was still in the heavens and whether the Spheres of Plague still floated in airlessness, blind eyes watchful. I wondered whether men still looked to the stars with trepidation and whether the skies yet bore the cancerous seed of mankind. There was no way for me to find out, for I lived in Hell during those days, where news of the living gained precious little circulation.

  I was a digger into minds, a head-tripper. I esped, I found secrets, knew lies, and reported all these things for a price. I esped. Some questions were never meant to be answered; some parts of a man's mind were never intended for scrutiny. Yet our curiosity is, at the same time, our greatest virtue and our most serious weakness. I had within my mind the power to satisfy any curiosity which tickled me. I esped; I found; I knew. And then there was a darkness in my soul, darkness unmatched by the depths of space that lay lightless between the galaxies, an ebony ache without parallel.

  The first two paragraphs are part of a frame, but packed with narrative hooks and exotic background. The main hook: what did the hero discover, through ESP, to so change his life, and what trouble did it cause him? The background teasers include strange names-Dragonfly, Spheres of Plague-and the existence of a man with ESP who evidently exists in the future.

  It started with a nerve-jangling ring of the telephone, a mundane enough beginning.

  I put down the book I was reading and lifted the receiver and said, impatiently perhaps, "Hello?"

  "Simeon?" the distant voice asked. He pronounced it correctly-Sim-ee-on.

  It was Harry Kelly, sounding bedraggled and bewildered, two things he never was. I recognized his voice because it had been-in years past-the only sound of sanity and understanding in a world of wildly gabbling self-seekers and power mongers. I esped out and saw him standing in a room that was strange to me, nervously drumming his fingers on the top of a simulated oak desk. The desk was studded with a complex panel of controls, three telephones, and three tri-dimensional television screens for monitoring interoffice activity, the work space of someone of more than a little importance.

  Here, a new character is introduced, in circumstances that indicate a problem about to develop. Also, we get more evidence of the future setting: the control-studded desk and tri-dimensional televisions.

  "What is it, Harry?"

  "Sim, I have another job for you. If you want it, that is. You don't have to take it if you're already wrapped up in something private."

  He had long ago given up his legal practice to act as my agent, and he could be counted on for at least one call a week like this. Yet there was a hollow anxiety in his tone which made me uncomfortable. I could have touched deeper into his mind, stirred through the pudding of his thoughts and discovered the trouble. But he was the one person in the World I would not esp for purely personal reasons. He had earned his sanctity, and he would never have to worry about losing it.

  In the no-nonsense fashion of category fiction, the relationship between these two characters is established. Also, with words like "hollow anxiety" and "uncomfortable," a tone of apprehension is slowly built.

  "Why so nervous?" I asked. "What kind of job?"

  "Plenty of money," he said. "Look, Sim, I know how much you hate these tawdry little government contracts. If you take this job, you're not going to need money for a long while. You won't have to snoop through a hundred government heads a week."

  "Say no more," I said. Harry knew my habit of living beyond my means. If he thought there was enough in this to keep me living fat for some time to come, the buyer had just purchased his merchandise. All of us have our price. Mine just came a little steeper than most.

  "I'm at the Artificial Creation complex. We'll expect you in-say twenty minutes."

  "I'm on my way." I dropped the phone into its cradle and tried to pretend I was enthusiastic. But my stomach belied my true feelings as it stung my chest with acidic, roiling spasms. In the back of my mind, The Fear rose and hung over me, watching with dinner-plate eyes, breathing fire through black nostrils. The Artificial Creation building: the womb, my womb, the first tides of my life…

  I almost crawled back into bed and almost said the hell with it. The AC complex was the last place on Earth I wanted to go, especially at night when everything would seem more sinister, when memories would play in brighter colors. Two things kept me from the sheets: I truly did not enjoy the loyalty checks I ran on government employees to keep me in spending money, for I was not only required to report traitors, but to delineate the abnormal (as the government defined that word) private practices and beliefs of those I scanned, violating
privacy in the most insidious fashion; secondly, I had just promised Harry I would be there, and I couldn't find a single instance when that mad Irishman had let me down.

  I cursed the womb which had made me, beseeching the gods to melt its plastic walls and short-circuit those miles and miles of delicate copper wires.

  I pulled on street clothes over pajamas, stepped into overshoes and a heavy coat with fur lining, one of the popular nordic models. Without Harry Kelly, I would most likely have been in prison at that moment-or in a preventive detention apartment with federal plain-clothes guards standing watch at the doors and windows. Which is only a more civilized way of saying the same thing: prison. When the staff of Artificial Creation discovered my wild talents in my childhood, the FBI attempted to "impound" me so that I might be used as a "national resource" under federal control for the "betterment of our great country and the establishment of a tighter American defense perimeter." It had been Harry Kelly who had cut through all that fancy language to call it what it was-illegal and immoral imprisonment of a free citizen. He fought the legal battle all the way to the nine old men in nine old chairs where the case was won. I was nine when we did that-twelve long years ago.

  We have now learned that the hero is apparently not of human parents, but an experiment of as yet unexplained "Artificial Wombs." He reads minds for pay-since his ability appears unusual-and is lucky to be a free citizen. We have also learned that the scene is the future United States, that Scandinavia is a source of fashions during this period, and that the hero is twenty-one.

  It was snowing outside. The harsh lines of shrubbery, trees and curbs had been softened by three inches of white. I had to scrape the windscreen of the hovercar, which amused me and helped settle my nerves a bit. One would imagine that, in 2004 A.D., Science could have dreamed up something to make ice scrapers obsolete.

  At the first red light, there was a gray police howler overturned on the sidewalk, like a beached whale. Its stubby nose was smashed through the display window of a small clothing store, and the dome light was still swiveling. A thin trail of exhaust fumes rose from the bent tailpipe, curled upwards into the cold air. More than twenty uniformed coppers were positioned around the intersection, though there seemed to be no present danger. The snow was tramped and scuffed, as if there had been a major conflagration, though the antagonists had disappeared. I was motioned through by a stern faced bull in a fur-collared fatigue jacket, and I obeyed. None of them looked in the mood to satisfy the curiosity of a passing motorist, or even to let me pause long enough to scan their minds and find it without their knowledge.