The Rules of Science Fiction

Rules 4 and 0 contributed by TSR.

Rule 4: It doesn’t have to be authentic; it just has to sound authentic (Shern Ren: “ :P ” ).

We live in a world governed by rules at various levels – the laws of physics, the principles of chemistry and biology determined by those laws, manners and taboos on the cultural level, and explicit ‘laws’ created by groups of people known as ‘governments’. Our brains are used to functioning in a structured world. Therefore, if you’re going to create a universe that breaks that structure, you have to establish yet another in order for the reader to be able to accept and imagine it. Some SF writers do try to stick as close as possible to known scientific principles, but that’s unnecessary unless you’re really hardcore geek and have lots of textbooks at hand. Even though providing some detail about the imaginary technology helps (it’s like mental special effects), you do _not_ need to be meticulously technical – how many SMS addicts know exactly how a handphone works?

An important corollary is that a story has to be self-consistent. That is, you can’t break your own rules. Writing something like “Ah Beng travelled to Alpha Centauri in 5 minutes by hyperspace bus” on page 1 and then on page 100, “Ah Beng’s journey back to Earth took him 50 years in hibernation because current technology still had not conquered the problem of going faster than light,” even if it’s convenient to the plot, will destroy the reader’s faith in the story. Bluff convincingly.

Rule 3: Virtually all SF texts (shorts, novels, movies, game storylines) are derivative in some way. That’s okay.

This came as a revelation when I was reading Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose”. The narrator notes while visiting a huge library, “I had thought each book spoke of the things...that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books...” This may be especially true for science fiction for two reasons: first, it’s awfully hard to build a universe from scratch; and second, people who are drawn to write SF often do so because they enjoyed reading other SF authors’ work.

What was brilliantly original about “The Matrix” wasn’t really any of its concepts – it borrowed ideas from everybody from Buddha to Jesus to Lewis Carroll (you really can’t get more obvious than that white rabbit) to William Gibson (“Neuromancer”) – or Keanu Reeves’ kayu acting, for that matter, but the Wachowski brothers’ storytelling, cinematography, and effects. Borrow ideas, but re-mould the material into your own creation.

Rule 2: “Derivative” does NOT mean you can ciplak someone’s plot/universe/characters/concepts bulat-bulat.

Self-explanatory. This is something that many new and young writers tend to do when we’re caught up in awe at our favourite authors and just in the process of learning to create stories. Then when you’re older and wiser (like in uni) your mum will pull out some ancient bundle of foolscap or dot-matrix printout and go “Remember that story you wrote in Form One?” and you will read it and bang your head against the wall in embarrassment. (My first fantasy short ever borrowed heavily from _both_ “The Lord of the Rings” and Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders series. No wonder it didn’t win the contest.)

Writing fanfiction is a legitimate way of trying your hand at dialogue, plot-building, description, and so on, as long as you’re honest with yourself that it’s fanfiction. I liken fanfic-writing to the way art students practise painting techniques by copying old masters.

In the meantime, if you’re still miserable that you can’t come up with anything original, take comfort in reading Ray Bradbury’s “Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s Is a Friend of Mine”.

Rule 1: Create a world, not a backdrop.

If you’re going to write a story about a forbidden affair between a beautiful girl from planet A falling in love with a handsome boy from planet B, forget about the interplanetary bit - that’s simply a remake of “Romeo and Juliet”. The nature of a science fiction story depends on its exploration of concepts. If you focus on some other element of the story to the point of neglecting to develop the ‘universe’ it’s set in properly, sorrylah. The story may function all right as whatever other type it’s supposed to be, but the SF fans will demand their money back. Remember how annoying it was to waste two hours watching “Species” thinking it was going to be as cool as “Alien” and discovering that the extraterrestrial material was just a lame disguise for a soft-porn flick? (Unless you like soft-porn – in which case I have no comment.)

CS Lewis, himself a science fiction enthusiast and author (in his earlier days it was called _scientifiction_, he was that old) has disparaging words about this sort of story:
“This seems to me tasteless. Whatever in a work of art is not used is doing harm. ...I am, then, condemning not all books which suppose a future widely different from the present, but those which do so without a good reason, which leap a thousand years to find plots and passions which they could have found at home.”
(From “On Science Fiction” which is a valuable essay for anyone interested in SF.)

Notice this is different from saying that romance, politics, war, dll. are _bad_. In fact, the human element in an SF story, as in any other story, is crucial because it’s what enables us, the readers, to associate with the characters and to feel that the world is ‘real’ (I was sooo happy when Miles Vorkosigan finally got married...). More on this later.

Rule 0: Science fiction has to be about people, not science (Shern Ren: “pwnage!”).

I’ve just read a very obscure novel which was written in France in 1849 about “The World As It Shall Be” in the year 3000 (by Emile Souvestre) and am still stunned at how much it looks like 2005. The author must have been a sharp observer of the social and political trends of his day, and wondered what would happen if they were taken to their [il]logical conclusion. A lot of SF writers wonder as much, with varying degrees of success. Others imagine a civilisation so far in the future or so distant from Earth that it has almost no connection to ours. It doesn’t matter – near or far, the heart of an SF story is the people in it, not the machines, not the aliens, not the wars, not the worlds.

The ultimate purpose of an SF story is to be what my old genetics prof would call a Gedankeneksperiment – a thought experiment. The range of topics, styles, and worldviews covered by SF is extremely broad, but all SF asks the question “What if...?” It tests the consequences of things which we may yet see in our lifetime (like cloning) or which may never exist (like superluminal travel or alien intelligence) to the human mind and to human society. If an experiment is to give results that are relevant to us, then it has to be set up in a way that makes sense. Characters and cultures, no matter how far removed from the present reality, still have to be ‘realistic’ in that the reader has to be able to believe that, in their own universe, they could exist. This is why you can’t write effectively about life a thousand years ahead, or life on other planets, without first knowing and appreciating something about life, here and now.