Architecture
Set aside the obvious: fantasy novels have castles and science fiction has starports. Building technology has changed an awful lot over the course of human history, and cultures from the Ancient Greeks to the oil-rich billionaires of present-day Dubai have expressed themselves in architecture. Some places—from the classical architecture of London or Paris to the stately row-house neighborhoods of Philadelphia—take an austere, pragmatic view of building. Other cultures—whether European aristocrats or Long Island’s nouveau riche—spend a couple extra million bucks in order to make a building knock your socks off.
The Egyptians and other ancient cultures built pyramids because in an era before the invention of the steel crane, the ziggurat or pyramid was the easiest shape for a very tall building. Even the grandest of the pyramids was little more than a pile of stone blocks, with stepped or slanted sides your workers could walk up as they went along. As impressive as the Great Pyramids are, I think the average Egyptian pharaoh would be blown off his feet by one glimpse of the Sears Tower’s 1,400 feet of vertical glass and steel. What does that mean to your fantasy or science fiction novel? What sort of buildings your world has (temples, bathhouses, public schools) will tell us about the culture of its people, and the size and shape (squat ziggurats, magical walking huts, anti-gravity floating cities) of their buildings will tell us about their available technology.
You can tell your reader a lot about the setting of your story by how people live in it. Medieval technology allowed for some impressive buildings, but there’s a reasonable limit to how tall a brick building can be before it collapses under its own weight. You really can’t build a building the height of the Sears Tower with anything other than steel—or magically infused bricks, or stone mined from the Quarry of the Gods, or the wood of the nine-thousand-foot-tall skyreach trees of the Forest of the Primal Ones. Especially in fantasy, don’t limit yourself to medieval materials if you don’t have to. What a building is made of can tell a story, too.
What wonders does the future of materials processing have in store for the architect? A space elevator that stretches all the way to orbit? A space station so huge it forms a continuous ring around the Earth? Thinking even bigger, what about Larry Niven’s Ringworld, a world so huge it stretches around a sun? What about a Dyson sphere that actually encloses a star?
If people in your far-future universe live in little two-story brick houses, that tells us something about that time: that somehow, for some reason, technology stopped and reversed, either because of some disaster or because people rejected the unchecked advance of technology and purposely ushered in a new era of simplicity.
Vehicles
In his tales of John Carter of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs imagined fantastic flying machines that carried his hero and his Martian princess around the world of Barsoom. And Burroughs was just the beginning. Fantasy has given us vehicles from flying ships to witches’ broomsticks, and flying mounts of all species, sizes, and shapes. Even if you start with a medieval level of technology, your created world doesn’t have to be limited to horse- or ox-drawn carts. Couldn’t those carts drive themselves via magic, so they’re like enchanted automobiles?
The first submarine brought to bear in a real-life wartime mission was the Turtle, invented in 1775 by American David Bushnell and set to work to bear (with mixed results) in the Revolutionary War. In your fantasy world inventors may have perfected the submarine long before they achieved other eighteenth-century technologies. Just as you did with magic, think through the greater implications of vehicles. If there are fliers, are there thousands or even millions of them? Are they like cars: almost everybody has one? Or are there a scant handful of expensive, exotic, experimental prototypes that only the emperor maintains?
How Fast Do They Go?
How quickly, conveniently, and economically people travel will determine how spread out their cities are. It also affects how quickly help can arrive when your hero gets in trouble: An hour? A minute? A month?
Science fiction vehicles can range from mundane cars with a twist, like the flying cars of the movie Blade Runner, all the way up to Star Wars’s Death Star. Remember the reaction of Obi-wan and Luke Skywalker when they first realized that the Death Star was man-made? They were freaked out and impressed, even had a hard time believing it at first. That told us a lot about those characters and how in over their heads they felt—how small they seemed in the face of that massive symbol of Imperial might. And we instantly knew that the Death Star was something special, something new.
Likewise, the U.S.S. Enterprise was as much a star of the various Star Trek series than any of the human (or Vulcan, or Klingon) characters. Not only were its mission and crew defined, but as the series progressed we got a better and better view of the ship’s capabilities. The writers also tried, to the best of their ability, to be consistent with its capabilities. The phaser beams always came from the same place at the bottom of the saucer section, and the shuttlecraft never came out of anywhere but the little garage in back.
Science fiction vehicles must be consistently handled in order to be plausible. If you know how warp drive works, stop wasting your time writing science fiction novels and get thee to a patent attorney as fast as humanly possible so you can begin enjoying your reign as the Bill Gates of faster-than-light travel. If you’re not sure exactly how your starship breaks the light speed barrier, don’t fear, just set your own rules and stick to them. Your readers have bought a science fiction novel so they get that you made it up. But please let them know that you’re paying attention to your own creation. If it takes three hours to get from Earth to Alpha Centauri, it takes three hours to get back.
Information Technology
We all think of “information technology” as the latest 3G phone or the next computer operating system upgrade, but there was information technology in ancient times. Stone tablets carved with Cuneiform inscriptions were examples of information technology. Gutenberg’s printing press was a huge leap forward in communications technology. Fantasy and science fiction authors need to consider how people communicate with each other over distance and/or time.
Has someone invented the printing press in your world? Are there schools for anyone but the privileged few? Are average people literate? Before the printing press, hand-copied books in Europe were tremendously expensive, so the overwhelming majority of Europeans in the Middle Ages never owned a book.
Let’s go back and say your story includes magic mirrors that act as telephones. Do they have something like 3G capability? Can they record conversations, allow you to eavesdrop on remote locations, or let you listen in on someone’s thoughts? If they can do any of those things and everyone has one, how has society adapted?
Two of the biggest questions facing the science fiction author about information technology are:
Is there artificial intelligence?
Can people communicate by faster-than-light means?
Answering the first question will determine whether your robots (if any) will become frightened when confronted by threats, like C-3PO does, or react to stimulus in a pre-programmed way, even if that programming sometimes goes off kilter. True artificial intelligence means that your computer/robot is as much a creative, emotional being as any human. If your robot can think for itself but is unable to form an opinion about whether or not it’s a slave, it’s a machine. If it can feel exploited, it’s a person. Arthur C. Clarke dealt with this in 2001: A Space Odyssey, as did Isaac Asimov in I, Robot.
For the purposes of your science fiction story, you do need to spend some time thinking about how people communicate with each other and their computers. Computers are not going to go away (unless you’re writing a post-apocalyptic story) and they’re going to continue to get more sophisticated. Do they plug into your head like in William Gibson’s seminal Neuromancer, or do they answer back when you speak to them like in Star Trek: The Next Generation?
If you’re writing a story set in a future wh
ere people are able to travel faster than light and begin exploring or settling far-flung solar systems, decide if their communication technology has caught up to their speed of travel. For most of human history communication was limited by the speed that someone could carry a message. The invention of the telegraph, and the telephone soon after, was world-altering in that it allowed real-time conversations between distant points. But what happens when you travel faster than light but you’re still using some version of radio, which continues to be confined to Einstein’s universal speed limit? That means if you phone home from Alpha Centauri it takes four years or so for someone on Earth to hear the phone ringing and another four years or so before you hear them say hello. But if you’re talking on something like the subspace radio from Star Trek, that boundary is broken. Consider the various implications then decide that for yourself, based on the needs of your characters and your story.
Mundane Stuff
Residents of a medieval-level society spent an awful lot of time doing very ordinary things that we zip through with hardly a thought in the twenty-first century. Being a housewife in the Middle Ages was hard work. There was no running water, let alone a washing machine. The men tilling the fields certainly weren’t riding around in modern combines, listening to the radio in air-conditioned comfort. The progress of human society can actually be traced by the distance between the calories required to produce food versus the calories taken in. This doesn’t mean that medieval people were skinnier than we are, necessarily, but they worked a lot harder for every calorie than we do as we pop TV dinners into the microwave.
Think about magic in your fantasy world—how pervasive it is, how mundane, and its effect on day-to-day technologies. Do people cook with magic ovens that prepare the meal from a bag of vegetables and a live chicken? Have they invented a magical refrigerator? A toaster powered by bound fire elementals? And how does all that change the way people interact with the world? And why does it matter to your story that someone can have toast for breakfast?
Most technological advances in human history have been driven by one of two things: convenience or war. Vacuum cleaners and washing machines made it unnecessary for even very rich people to employ armies of servants. Strangely enough, over the years we’ve developed our self-reliance through a dependence on modern conveniences. Will this trend continue into the future? I don’t know, and neither do you, but you don’t have to be able to see into the future to write plausible science fiction. You only need to look into your imagination, carefully craft your own set of rules, and follow them for plausibility’s sake.
TO SUM UP
Remember: If you’re translating everything your characters do and say from their native language, either real-world foreign, historical, or created, choose with the utmost caution what you choose not to translate.
Always keep in mind that your book should be readable. You don’t get points for complexity alone. Tell your story first, and build the world to serve your characters, not the other way around.
Don’t spend any time suffering over whether or not your book is realistic—if it’s science fiction or fantasy, it isn’t—but suffer a lot over whether or not it’s plausible. Plausibility is built from consistency. Set your own rules, and once you’ve set them, follow them.
As always, ask questions, and find your answers by digging through research into history, current events, engineering, occult practices, religion, architecture, ancient and cutting-edge technology, and so on. If you’re creating a world of your own, really make it your own. Remember, you have no special effects budget when you’re writing a novel, so let your imagination soar. Let your world be as big as you can imagine, as long as your characters are big enough not to get lost in it.
Know when to say, “Enough!” to research and explanation. Heed this advice from veteran fantasy author Terry Brooks: “Three-quarters of what you know about that world should never appear in your book, but you should be able to speak to it, anyway. Your writing should suggest to the reader that if he thought to ask you, he would discover that you know a lot more than you’re telling him.”
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STEP FIVE | NUTS AND BOLTS
“Fantasy is the genre where reality is only the starting point, and the imagination takes over from there.”
—KEVIN J. ANDERSON, coauthor of Paul of Dune
There are three essential elements of the craft of genre writing: action, romance, and humor. All three will inform the characters you’ve started to develop, color the plot of your novel, showcase your unique world, and help express your idea or theme. The balance between these three elements will also help define the subgenre you’re working in, and it will inform your publisher’s efforts to market the book. As with all aspects of fiction writing, or any art or craft, practice makes perfect. You can find advice on writing an exciting action scene here and in other books, but there’s no formula you can follow that will make you an immediate success. Take this advice to heart and keep banging on that keyboard. If writing is truly where your talents lie, in time you’ll find what works for you and what doesn’t, and eventually you’ll have a book in which something happens in an interesting way.
CHAPTER 26
DON’T SPARE THE ACTION
In fantasy and science fiction, the word action probably conjures up visions of steely eyed warriors locked in mortal combat, blade-to-blade, mano a mano. Or maybe a single hero desperately fending off the hungry assault of a hideous monster straight from some madman’s nightmare. Or a valiant ragtag group of colonists fending off an advancing horde of alien shocktroopers with only their farm tools and maintenance robots to protect them.
But open that definition up a bit and you’ll find that there’s a little bit of action happening all the time. Though those action set pieces are essential to any successful science fiction or fantasy novel, so are the little action sequences that occur within every single scene.
BUSINESS
As I’m typing this, at the desk in a little loft space in the upstairs hallway at home, my son is passing back and forth from the stairs engaged in various work-avoidance strategies to put off the inevitable homework. My wife is downstairs doing something I can’t see, but I can hear her moving around down there. Wait—the dog just barked. My daughter is even now asking me for some paper from the printer. The television is on, but I don’t think anyone is watching it.
All this counts as action. My son walks by reciting TV commercial catch-phrases. He’s moving. He’s doing something. And he’s doing it for a reason: He doesn’t want to do his homework. So like everything, his “action” is motivated. In the movie world they call this kind of thing “business.”
The pages of a screenplay might contain lines of dialog alternating between two or three characters, but if those people are just volleying lines back and forth, it’ll feel pretty dull on screen. That’s why conversations in movies and television shows tend to take place while characters are walking along the beach, eating at a restaurant, or digging through a kitchen cabinet looking for something. And if the movie is well written, there’s a reason for them to be there as opposed to someplace else, doing that as opposed to something else.
If three of your characters are in a room and all they’re doing is batting about dialog, you may be moving the story forward, but you’re doing so in a limp and lifeless way.
Sometimes you can express as much in carefully crafted action, including smaller actions (“business”) as you can in dialog.
DIALOG ONE
“Bronwyn couldn’t have survived the fire, your highness,” Galen told the king.
“I know. And I know you loved her very much, but if you feel like crying please take a moment and gather yourself because the barbarians are at the gates and we’ll need you to help fend them off.”
“Yes, your highness. You can depend on me.”
“I can tell that axe you’re carrying is magical by the lightning bolts flickering across the blade,” the king went on. “Make
sure you bring that with you.”
“Will do, your highness,” Galen replied, “but I sure do wish Bronwyn were here. Just thinking of her brings a tear to my eye.”
“I miss her too,” said the king, “but I will also hold back my tears. We have a job to do.”
We learned a lot about Galen, Bronwyn, and the king here, but it sure is stiff. Let’s try it again with “business.”
DIALOG TWO
“Bronwyn couldn’t have survived the fire,” Galen said.
“I know you loved her,” the king replied, reaching out to put a hand on Galen’s shoulder.
Galen turned away, wiping a tear from his eye with the back of his hand. He steadied himself on the windowsill and looked down upon the torches of the barbarian horde preparing for the coming day’s siege.
“Gather yourself,” the king commanded. “The kingdom will need you now.”
Galen turned and looked at the king, but the monarch’s eyes were on the axe in Galen’s hand. The flickering blue lightning that traced the blade’s edge reflected in a single tear that rolled down the king’s cheek.
Galen tightened his grip on the axe handle, and the king said, “Bring that with you.”
“I wish she were here to wield it,” Galen said, then cleared his throat and stood up straight.
The king gave him a sad but respectful nod and said, “We have a job to do.”
True, I used thirty more words in the second example, but we also know a little bit more about what’s going on here.
The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction Page 12