The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction

by Philip Athans

  Researching religions both contemporary and historical is a worthy pursuit for any author, though if you’re writing the farthest of far-future science fiction you may imagine a post-religious society. Religious questions may be a driving force in a novel set in an alternate history setting—one, for instance, that attempts to answer the question: “What if the Roman Empire never embraced Christianity and instead Europe maintained its polytheism into the twenty-first century?” In such a scenario, how could you imagine the way in which the absence of Christianity might have changed Europe if you don’t understand the effect Christianity actually had on European history?

  DRAW ON THE REAL WORLD

  As with all else, feel free to find inspiration in real-world religions, as author Kevin J. Anderson did in his Terra Incognita trilogy. His story “is driven by a clash between two opposing religions—Aidenists and Urecari—based on Medieval Christianity and Medieval Islam.” Anderson says, “I studied both of those base religions and the historical context, then adapted them, created my own symbols, the different priesthoods, the rituals, then extrapolated them into the society. For a religion to be believable, it has to extend outside the bounds of the church or temple and into the daily lives of the people.”

  Religion need not overwhelm a story or characters. The deeper an understanding of it you have, the more naturally it will fit in as a part of your fictional world’s backdrop. As you ask yourself questions about your created religion, you’ll start to wonder how it affects your characters. There may be simple, day-to-day things—do characters start every morning with a prayer?—or complicated, larger events, such as when your hero rescues a would-be victim of human sacrifice.

  In far future or entirely imagined science fiction universes the subject of religion can be avoided a bit or glossed over, but it doesn’t have to be. In British author Simon R. Green’s space opera series that began with the novel Deathstalker, there’s a faction known as the Church Militant. These are religious zealots—one part Spanish Inquisition, one part al Qaeda, and one part Moral Majority—who serve as pawns for villains and foils for heroes. Green spends no words at all putting the Church Militant’s dogma into any kind of context. They’re just violent religious fanatics. For his purposes, that’s enough, and the Church Militant works in the context of the series and his created far-future universe.

  THE ROLE OF RELIGION IN THE STORY

  Some authors, like Frank Herbert, expend a lot of thought on the role of religion in the world and in their story, and it informs much of what progresses as the story unfolds. Kevin J. Anderson notes, “One of the best examples, to me, is what Frank Herbert created in Dune with the Fremen and their belief in Shai-Hulud. On the surface, it might seem a typical ‘primitive people worshiping a giant monster’ as you see in so many clichéd fantasies. But the Fremen have an entire accompanying philosophy, that the sandworms aren’t really the god but a manifestation of the power of the desert; they have water rituals (which stem directly from the harsh desert landscape in which they live); they have a culture surrounding their religion: prayers, common sayings, all the details that show how pervasive those beliefs are.”

  Religion doesn’t just give you a list of rules. There’s a lot more to the Judeo-Christian playbook than the Ten Commandments. Religion sinks tendrils into all aspects of daily life from the obvious, like saying grace before eating, to what has become—in our culture at least—the mundane, with expressions like “Oh my God” or “for God’s sake,” not actually meaning to invoke the deity—they’ve become simply figures of speech.

  As Kevin J. Anderson points out, there’s more to a well-crafted imagined religion than a series of idiomatic search-and-replaces (“Oh my Gorthak,” or “for Gorthak’s sake”). The religion of the Fremen in Dune comes out of the environment in which they live. If you’ve created a religion for a science fiction novel set on a planet that is as much a body of water as Frank Herbert’s Arrakis was a desert, how would the water-world people’s religion differ from Dune’s? Historically, people tend to build religions around things they need, dangers they face, or knowledge they’re missing. Religion fills a need. Before you go off creating sacrificial rites and exotic rituals, think carefully about what the people of your world need from their gods.

  WE’RE BACK TO ASKING QUESTIONS

  That same advice again: Ask questions that inspire more questions, and keep asking and answering until you feel you’ve got something. When do you know you’ve “got something”? One clue may be when you spend the better part of a day thinking about it and can’t come up with another question. Or if God appears and tells you to get off your ass and start writing.

  CHAPTER 24

  IT’S NOT FANTASY WITHOUT MAGIC

  As with every aspect of world building, when you are devising a magic system, consistency is king. For example, let’s say you write a scene in which your hero, a wizard, conjures a ball of purple fire that engulfs an entire village, but a hundred pages later, he watches in impotent horror as a marauding gang of bandits storms down a hill. “Now wait a minute,” alert readers will say. “Why doesn’t he just conjure up that purple fire and immolate the evil bandits?” If he does conjure up that fire, it had better be purple again or readers will need to understand why it isn’t purple—is it a different sort of magical fire? If there’s no fire, then you’ll need to make clear why he’s unable to conjure it up in this instance when he could before.

  The same problem would occur if these two scenes were reversed: if the wizard could do something on page 200 that he couldn’t do on page 20. If he’s gained an ability to generate purple fire, you must show us how he learned to do this in the intervening 180 pages.

  NOTES ARE YOUR FRIEND

  The greatest aid to consistency is to take notes. If you know how magic works and have it written down somewhere, problems like this can be avoided.

  If you’re writing in a shared-world setting like the Dungeons & Dragons–related novels or World of Warcraft, the game gives you a detailed system of magic. Take that seriously or your editor will take it seriously for you. But even without a predetermined system of magic at your disposal—and D&D’s rules (or those from World of Warcraft, or Warhammer) are something authors of those novels should embrace and accept as inspiration, not combat as strictures—you’ll need to be just as consistent with your own created magic system as you would be with someone else’s.

  Keep your notes on your computer, or your notebook by your side, and refer to them often. Read back carefully, and think about how magic infuses and affects every scene. If your wizard can teleport with the snap of his fingers, why is he trapped in a cave a couple chapters later? Don’t forget what your magic does, how it does it, and who can use it.

  Do some serious thinking about how “magic rich” you would like your world to be. Is this a historical setting in which a little magic might go a long way? A world in which magic is rare and banned for its dangerous unpredictability, or highly prized for its power and exotic rarity? For instance, in Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, magic is rare, generally considered a bad thing practiced by witches and necromancers, and Conan tends to react to it with fear and revulsion. But in Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, everyone, even little kids, has a dæmon familiar, and no one thinks this is at all strange

  Again we find ourselves at the crossroads of realism and plausibility.

  Magic is pretend. In the real world it doesn’t work. That means any fantasy novel you read (or write) is instantly unbelievable—it is inherently unrealistic. But that’s what we love about fantasy. We don’t want it to be realistic. We’ll leave realism to Nelson Algren, Harvey Pekar, and other Quotidians. At the same time, this doesn’t mean your story can go off on whatever flight of fancy comes to you in the moment and still be a well-crafted work of fiction.

  CONSISTENCY IS THE FATHER OF PLAUSIBILITY

  If the wizard can conjure a storm of purple fire, we don’t believe that could actually happen in real life�
��which would make it realistic. But if he conjures the fire in the same way every time, if the spell follows its own proscribed set of rules, we accept that it happened in the context of that fantasy world—we find it plausible.

  On the other hand, if the purple fire is suddenly ten times more destructive in Chapter 14 than it was in Chapter 3, and you give no thought to making clear why or how it’s more powerful, it’s less plausible, and you’ll start to lose your readers, you’ll upset their suspension of disbelief. But suppose the wizard picked up a purple crystal along the way that seemed to pulse with magical energy, and the next time he conjures his purple fire he’s surprised to find it’s bigger and more destructive. The reader then understands that something new has been added: the crystal somehow supplements the wizard’s purple fire.

  MAKE MAGIC SERVE YOUR STORY

  Unless you’re designing a game, there’s no reason to start by explaining how magic works and then forcing your characters and story into that scheme. As with all other aspects of world building, magic must first and foremost serve your characters and story, moving them forward rather than holding them back.

  When Paul Park began thinking about his breakout novel A Princess of Roumania, he “did a certain amount of research into the history and technology of alchemy, and then imagined that alchemy actually worked. The magical procedures in the books were derived from scientific procedures.”

  He did research. He read up on the subject. There are numerous sources on the history of magic, from scholarly anthropological studies to “New Age” self-help books. Pick and choose from these, keeping in mind that the human animal is infinitely creative, and over the millennia we’ve come up with some wild stuff from zombie potions to pyramid power, crystal vibrations to astrology. The history of occult and religious practices, myth and legend, will offer up a Vegas-sized buffet of inspiration.

  Take all that, then, and make it your own. Though individual creativity is essential in all things, in the fashioning of a magic system a little bit more inventiveness than the last guy will go a long way. Read extensively, then think. Ask questions again, always with an eye on your characters and your story. What will the way magic works tell your readers about your characters and the world in which they live? How will magic move the plot forward? Then think carefully about the effect that magic will have on your world.

  In 1962’s “Profiles of the Future,” science fiction legend Arthur C. Clarke wrote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

  I’ll bring that up again in the next chapter when I talk about technology, but let’s turn that around in the context of fantasy: Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.

  Magic is a tool. It may be a rare tool useable only by a chosen few, or it may be something almost everyone has access to and uses casually in daily life. Does the conjured purple fire in our ongoing example replace the flame thrower or a napalm bomb? When it’s used as a weapon, yes. A crystal ball or magic mirror used to communicate over vast distances is a fantasy version of the telephone. The Oracle of Delphi and Google serve the same function, don’t they?

  When Alexander Graham Bell first invented the telephone, there were only two of them. Had he stopped there it might have seemed like some kind of magical device. This would be the magic mirror of a low-magic world. Maybe there are only two in existence in the whole world, used by the evil queen to communicate with her general who’s sailing out to attack the island of the elves. But once the telephone was marketed and mass produced, and eventually everyone had one, it certainly seemed a lot less magical, but the world itself also changed in very real, very dramatic ways. The modern fire department grew out of our ability to quickly call the operator, then 911, to summon help from a distance. Whole industries were born, from pizza delivery to phone sex. So if in your world everybody has a magic mirror they can use like a video phone, make sure you think that through in terms of how quickly characters can communicate with each other. Writers of contemporary action movies now have to contend with the cell phone, for instance, and they often go to great lengths to somehow isolate their characters in a time and place where very few people are ever truly isolated.

  CHAPTER 25

  IT’S NOT SCIENCE FICTION WITHOUT TECHNOLOGY

  In the last chapter we discussed magic systems in the context of fantasy, and it may seem then that this chapter is germane only to science fiction. Ah, if only it were that simple. Technology exists in any story in which the protagonists are creatively intelligent beings. A caveman with a sharpened stick is making use of the cutting-edge (pun kinda intended—sorry) technology of his day. A sea elf defending himself against a kraken with an enchanted trident is doing the same, as is an interstellar marine hefting the latest model fusion blaster. A technological item is anything that anyone makes, especially tools.

  MORE RESEARCH TO DO

  In determining your world’s available technology, you’ll want to do some research and ask yourself more questions, but how deeply you delve into either the history of medieval metallurgy or the inner workings of the Large Hadron Collider is really up to you. Your fantasy world, if it’s entirely created, doesn’t have to be an accurate reflection of any real-world time and space, and slipstream or broadly drawn space opera doesn’t have to rely too heavily on scientific and engineering journals. Acclaimed science fiction author Mike Resnick, for instance, describes himself as “kind of the anti–Arthur C. Clarke.” He admits that he puts in “a lot of thought and very little research. I never want the technology to be the star of the story or to distract or divert from the human story I want to tell.”

  On the other hand, authors who decide to delve into historical fantasy, alternate history, contemporary science fiction or urban fantasy, or near-future science fiction are going to have to be prepared to do quite a bit more research. If you’re determined to go down that route, either you’ve already done a lot of the digging or you’re the kind of person who sees research as a fascinating challenge. If you possess an excess of intellectual curiosity, research stops being a drag, and the only problem you face is knowing when to stop studying and start writing.

  THE FIVE CATEGORIES OF TECHNOLOGY

  For simplicity’s sake I’ve broken all of technology down into five broad categories, though I freely admit there are lots more, and a reasonable person may combine two of mine into one, and so on.

  Weapons

  Some people complain that science fiction and fantasy are inherently violent genres, overly concerned with macho wish fulfillment expressed as armed violence as the primary means of conflict resolution. My first published fantasy novel, Baldur’s Gate, began with this sentence: “The blades came together so hard they threw out a blue-white spark bright enough to burn its gentle arc into Abdel’s vision.” So, I suppose I could be accused of feeding into that stereotype. In fact, there are plenty of science fiction and fantasy novels that aren’t overly preoccupied with violent action and weaponry. But for those that are …

  Fantasy Weaponry

  Fantasy weapons usually start at a basic medieval or early Renaissance technology level: swords and armor, catapults and trebuchets, mounted cavalry, and maybe very early cannons. In that case you should get a sense of the variety of blades and pole weapons, and the accuracy of things like the bow and arrow or the javelin. Medieval and ancient archers tended to act more as artillery—their bows were indirect fire weapons that sent a cloud of arrows over the enemy’s line. One archer rarely targeted a particular enemy soldier. A minute ago I mentioned the catapult and the trebuchet—do you know the difference? Does it matter? Is one arrow enough to kill someone? Could you survive even one hit with a battle-axe? Read and make notes until you have an answer.

  Study the effect of one technology on another. Did the invention of the crossbow change the way armor was made? The invention of the musket sure did. The cannon made walled cities obsolete, didn’t it? What good is a wall if your enemy can easily lob bomb
s over it from a distance or siege engines can blow a hole in it? In a fully invented world, don’t be afraid to mix and match or invent weapons. Combine magic and technology to make things that were never seen in real life, like machine-crossbows or flaming swords.

  Are Blasters Better than Swords?

  Science fiction weapons should be no less well considered. Does your future world have laser weapons? If so, how do you defend against them? What is a “blaster,” actually? You don’t have to write a patent application for one, mind you, but if it can melt a hole in a starship’s bulkhead in Chapter 3, it can do it again in Chapter 8. Just as with the magical purple fire, consistency and plausibility rule in the realm of technology, and you should be making no fewer notes in order to keep a strict eye on your own rules.