Tag Archives: science fiction

Space for Writing

by Jeremy Kerns

I see that in the past 6 months, I’ve written two posts and both have been on the rather… sad side of things. So, maybe I should try to finish out the year with something a little more light-hearted.

Writing

Once again I missed NaNoWriMo this year as I had a few things on my plate that made writing pretty low on my list. So, I found myself inspired just after the end of NaNo to finally jump into something and turned to my fellow Thotplacer and indefatigable wordsmith Bob McCoog to participate in a personal challenge of our own. And please understand, this trooper had just completed his NaNo book when I proposed this little war of words.

To make a long story short (or, now that I think about it, I might actually be making a short story longer…), on December 4th the two of us embarked on a mission, inspired by an article on io9.com that can be found here regarding The 10 Rules for Space Operas. The task is simple: a minimum 75,000 words, a maximum 2 months (ending February 4th), and the space opera story we write must include all of the article’s rules.

It’s been 11 days so far and I, for one, have been enjoying the experience of this writing challenge. Space opera would not have been my previous first choice for a novel, but I’ve found it to be really fun nonetheless. I started off strong with my word-count-per-day, but have slowed down some since for various reasons, putting me at a total of just under 17,000 words at this moment.
Post-combustion

Anyway, that’s what we’re doing (among other things). If you’re looking to write and find yourself stuck for an idea, you might consider the same type of challenge for yourself. Or, better yet, take a stab at this particular challenge and see what you end up with. The article is a great tongue-in-cheek list of common space opera tropes and figuring out how to write a somewhat original novel around them has been a worthwhile experience.

And that’s what it’s all about.

(hmmm… it’s been a while since I wrote one of these posts. Feels like I should end it with a clever zinger but I think I missed the mark on the one above. Ah, well, you get what you pay for.)

PUT YOUR SCIENCE IN MY FANTASY

by Jeremy Kerns

If Star Wars ranks in the top five of your favorite science fiction works, deduct 12 points.

It may be that THE one element to set humans apart from all other life on Earth is pattern recognition. From language to art, tool usage to the ability to identify others, pattern recognition is the underlying skill that makes it all possible. A side effect of this predilection is the tendency to WANT to find patterns in our world – to make sense of the things around us. One way we do this is by categorizing.

Categories can be quite useful, both in our ability to understand things within the proper context, as well as to make us feel like those things are a part of an orderly, understandable world; not a universe of chaos. But, sometimes, those categories are simply academic and may not serve us as well as we think. The downside, of course, is that believing that everything must fit into certain categories, with specific criteria, limits our ability at times to see those things for what they really are.

Okay, enough ambiguous generalizations and high-brow rhetoric about the human condition. Let’s get more specific. A disturbing trend I see in genre fiction is to divide fantasy and science fiction along arbitrary lines of magic and machines, monsters and space, Pangaea and dystopian futurescapes. The de facto litmus test for inclusion in science fiction appears to be: it’s set in the future, it includes technology we don’t have now, it takes place in space and/or it has aliens in it. Instead, our definition should be more in line with what science fiction is truly intended to be: a fictional story with at least some scientific fact at its core.

And that’s where some of you lost 12 points. Star Wars is a fantasy tale. Yes, it’s set in space with aliens and spaceships, but the story has no real scientific fact at its core. Nor does it need any science to tell its archetypal story. It’s a story about a hero, wandering through fantastic lands filled with strange and wonderful creatures, wielding his sword and tapping into his sorcery-like powers to wage war against the dark forces of evil sweeping over the lands. It just so happens that much of this takes place in space, with lots of spaceships and robots.

But this is more than just a geeky debate or a desire to start a flame war with Star Wars devotees. This is about the potential for more, even greater tales. For once we all get back to the idea that fantasy tales can take place in space, or involve robots, or be set in the crumbling post-apocalyptic remains of a future Detroit, we’ll have that many more enjoyable tales. Or when we realize that science fiction tales can take place in the past (imagine the early 1900s if Babbage’s Analytical Engine had been built in the 1860s), perhaps we’ll see all new ways of seeing how science can alter our perception of the world.

So let’s break out of our neatly categorized boxes we’ve created. Let us throw off the shackles of our recent history of fantasy discrimination. My invocation to all fans of genre storytelling, creators and consumers alike, is that we worry less about how we define those stories, and more about where those stories can take us.