me and science fiction

Science Fiction Books, New Readers, and Exclusion

This post is inspired by this great article from Locus Mag: Kameron Hurley: Making Excuses for Science Fiction, which says:

In SF/F circles, we delight in complexity and sense-of-wonder. We spend millions upon millions of words debating about the slim difference between ‘‘science fiction’’ and ‘‘fantasy.’’ But folks outside of it really couldn’t care less. People outside of the SF/F bubble just want to know, quickly and simply, what it’s about.

No elitism. No BS.

and also:

I often wonder if, in speaking about the books we love the way we do, we’ve created the very ghetto we purport to hate. ‘‘Take us seriously!’’ we say, and then retreat into the familiar world of our sub cultures, insist­ing that only ‘‘real geeks’’ need apply. The broader the appeal of science fiction and fantasy, the more it’s turned inward. After all, if everyone can understand and enjoy the latest hot SF book without reading Heinlein’s entire body of work, well, how good can it really be?

I fear that the language of exclusion, whether we perpetrate it through self-consciousness or a sniff of geeky elitism, is doing the genre more harm than good. Strangling our own potential audience.

This rings very true for me. I’ve been a fan of science fiction for a long time, but most of my consumption of the genre has come through TV, computer games, and movies. Not from books, at least until recently. The few books I did read when I was younger, the Foundation series and a few Star Wars and Star Trek ones, were hardly the hardest of sci-fi settings either.

What I found, when I started to read a lot more space operas, starting a few years ago, was that some books I just bounced straight off. They threw new/made up words at me from page one, often making me very confused as to what they meant and what was going on.

There seemed to be a big assumption with a lot of these books that as a sci-fi fan, I must have read loads of books and be familiar with the literary tropes and styles of the genre. I hate to think how someone who’s only consumed TV sci-fi must react to books like that.

The space operas I’ve been reading that I’ve really enjoyed, The Player of Games being the best example, are the ones that focus on character and story. Sure, there is a rich and interesting universe that the book is set in, but that compliments the story and adds depth to it, instead of being the story itself.

Now I know there will be a lot of people who disagree with me, many of the books that failed the 100 page test for me, Revelation Space and Embassy Town for example, that are very highly regarded and award winning, and they have a lot of fans.

But I still can’t shake the feeling that written sci-fi, of the best quality, could gain a much bigger audience if it put itself in more everyday terms, and focused on the characters and story. That is what I’m hoping to do with my own, and I hope people will enjoy the stories I want to tell.

Description v Dialog and How Much of the World to Show

Today I want to talk about two different but related subjects. The balance of description v dialog in a book, and how much of the world in a sci fi novel to show.

This is on my mind because of work I’m doing for the second edit of Oranje. One of the issues my editor brought up after their first pass on the book was the amount of dialog in the book compared to the amount of description/action.

Now, I need to say I don’t like books with excessive amounts of description. It’s one of the things that put me off the Game of Throne books after reading a few of them. A lot of my time felt like it was spent reading endless descriptions of clothing or feasts instead of progressing the story, and these are big books. Science fiction as well tends to have an aspect of ‘look at this immensely detailed world I’ve created!’ to a lot of stories, and the description of even little minute detail slow down the story and make it drag.

I much prefer a lighter approach to description, books where this is sprinkled throughout the length of them, giving little glimpses of the larger world behind the story.

On the other hand a sense of wonder is important for science fiction. Some of my favourite sci-fi stories helped draw me into feeling I was in a different and interesting world. There is a balance that needs to be achieved.

For the first edit I’d say I got it wrong. There is too much dialog, and not enough description of the world to allow readers to build a coherent view of the setting. There’s also not enough description of what people are doing during conversations, making it harder to pick up how characters are feeling as well.

They key is trying to get the feel right, enough description and action to draw a reader in, give them enough of a glimpse of the world for them to be able to fill in the rest of the detail. But not too much that it gets in the way of the story, and end up with a book of unnecessary details.

It’s going to be interesting to see where Oranje ends up on that scale, and how closely I get to what I’m aiming to do.

Let’s talk about set(ting) baby!

Yes that title is there entirely for the pun.

With editing work on Oranje about to start I thought I would talk about the setting for the story and some of the themes that will be part of it. This post will summarise them and then I’ll elaborate on each one in its own entry but I hope these will help communicate a lot of the ideas behind the setting.

  • The when – The September series and subsequent stories set in the same universe will take place over a thousand years in the future where humanity has spread across the galaxy and there are hundreds of colonised worlds.
  • A decelarando universe – Best summed up by this article from Rocketpunk Manifesto, technological progress in the setting has slowed down so tech wise it is not too far from what might be seen over the next few centuries (or at least as much as we can predict).
  • Balkanised humanity – Once united humanity is now divided into nations that do not tend to go beyond the region of space they are in. September is one of those regions.
  • ‘Realistic’ technologies – Spacecraft are powered by nuclear reactors and use chemical engines to get around. Radiators are a necessity to get rid of heat, 3d printing is used in construction and also in medical areas as well. It’s aiming to be based about what we can predict now
  • Well, mostly realistic technologies – This is not aiming to be hard sci-fi, there are a few additional techs added for story reasons. Those being faster-than-light travel and communications and artificial gravity. These technologies are going to have sensible limitations on them, no appearing in high orbit to drop hugely accelerated bombs on a planet then disappearing in the blink of an eye.
  • Diverse humanity – We’re a diverse species and I intend to get some of that across in the setting for the book. Much of the population of worlds in September are from Africa and India originally and I’m trying to avoid mono-culture planets as much as possible as a) they’re not very realistic b) they’re not very interesting either.

So those are the goals I am aiming for with the setting and the background to the story. I want it to feel like it is part of an on-going history and world that exists and not just a background that has been created just for this story to exist in. It should be complex, diverse, difficult and layered.

It should be a setting based on humans for a story about people.

Next time, I talk more about why I’m setting it so far in the future.

Me and Science Fiction: Space Opera I Have Read Recently

Having talked about what I love in sci-fi and how my history with the genre has mostly been through TV, I thought I would talk of some space opera books I have recently and what I think of them.

The three books are:

They are all highly rated on Goodreads as you can see from the above links and all are regularly recommended as great examples of the space opera genre. So with that in mind some of what I’m about to say almost feels blasphemous.

I did not like Revelation Space, Consider Phlebas was okay but I did really enjoy The Player of Games.

Revelation Space failed the 100 page rule for me. The setting seemed to be very thought out and with a lot of depth to it, but the characters and story just weren’t doing it for me. Of the three main protagonists only one felt like they had any depth, the rest felt quite flat. The plot was moving at 100 pages but still didn’t seem to be fully into the main part of the story yet.

I also had a big problem with the amount of technobabble and (what felt to me) needless description in the book. Lots of new terms are thrown at you without context in many cases which I found confusing as I had no idea what they meant or if they were important enough. Some were explained further in but it felt like a lot was being dumped on the reader and not in a good way.

With the description, there was a section where two whole pages were devoted to describing the layout of a single spacecraft. Later chapters went over this again so it very much felt like it being explained for the sake of explaining it where the information could have been given to readers over many chapters in little snippets instead of one big section. Hitting sections like that slowed me down a lot, there was nothing about the story or characters for two whole pages it was just description.

Consider Phlebas I got through to the end. I definitely enjoyed it more than Revelation Space, the story flowed better and I was interested in it from the start. It was an interesting romp around part of the Culture universe and it was a nice introduction to the Minds, the benevolent AI that basically run humanity.

However the characters also felt a bit flat in this one, they lacked depth. The story also rambled at times; it seemed to be more interested in showing of all the interesting locations that had been created rather than moving the plot and story along. By the end it felt like a third to a half of the book could have been cut out with no adverse effect on the overall story and would have improved the pacing a lot.

It was a decent book for me, but almost put me off the rest of the Culture books as I was worried that many would be as rambling as this. Luckily I decided to give them one more try when I saw The Player of Games on sale and I’m very glad I did.

This is the kind of book I love. A strong story and character in a rich and believable setting that grabs your attention and holds it until the end. Every scene helped tell me more about the plot or the central character and both had more depth to them. I loved it and read it at every opportunity I had until I had finished it.

I feel like I’ve mostly talked about what I don’t like and not much about what I do, but talking about what turns me away from a story or what makes me put a book down I think is a good way to also say what drags me in and makes me fall into the story a book is trying to tell.

  • Characters with depth – People are fascinating, and people drive stories forward. Characters with emotion, with believable motivations and goals, imperfect people with flaws as well as strengths give readers someone to get invested in. Someone to care about as the story goes along.
  • A story that makes you turn the page – Every scene in a book should move the story forward or tell you something about one of the characters. Stories that go on huge side tracks that don’t add anything to the plot or help add more depth are unnecessary. There is a lot that can be done to add more to a book without irrelevant story arcs.
  • Great world building as a setting not the focus – I love world building, god knows I’ve spent a lot of time on that over the years on various projects, but that should be done to create a believable setting. The reader does not need to have everytihng you have created explained to them nor should the story detour just to show it off. Good world building should be almost invisible as it adds believability and depth to a story, it should blend in.
  • A story anyone can read – Making up new terms can be great and all, but readers need to know what is going on. I can’t help but feel that some science-fiction books are relying on readers prior knowledge of the genre to understand some of what is talked about, which just makes them hard for new readers to the genre to get into. Technical terms and made up words should be used sparingly. In most stories the characters will understand what is going on, so should the reader. Call a fork a fork.

So there we go, my thoughts on recent books I have read, and more elaboration on what I like in science-fiction stories. Hopefully this will give an indication of what I am aiming for with my own books.

Me and Science Fiction: What I Love in Sci-Fi

This is where I begin to diverge from the few videos I did. If I was following the same sequence here is where I would be talking about recent space opera books I’ve read and what I thought of them.

However looking at what I’ve done so far in this series, I felt like I need to talk more about what I love about science fiction, so that when I talk about those books and what I liked/disliked about them there is a reference point for what I enjoy. This is going to be done by discussing mostly TV series as that is what most of the sci-fi I have consumed has been.

The shows that are best examples of why I love the genre are Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, Stargate SG-1, Farscape, Star Trek: Deep Space 9 and the lone book series, the Foundation trilogy. To go through each one and say what I love about each would take a while so I’m going to talk about common themes.

Great characters

What was really memorable about these shows was the characters, from Salvor Hardin in Foundation to Captain Sisko in DS9 and of course Malcolm Reynolds in Firefly. But it isn’t just the protagonists in all of these that were good characters, each one has a good range of characters, Foundation being the weakest in that respect. They also feature great female characters, something I’ve noticed that the science fiction books I’ve been reading recently have generally been lacking which surprises and disappoints me.

The characters are all believable, you understand why they do what they do, and aren’t all do gooders with paper thin personalities. You cared about them and you could relate to them.

Believable settings

The characters are a big part in this, but it is also how each setting is depicted. None of them feel too clean or perfect, there are flaws and many facets to them that add depth. This is why DS9 was my favourite instead of Next Generation, that always felt too perfect whereas DS9 had nice grey areas to it.

They built believability by having things not always work perfectly, by having societies that messed up and characters that made mistakes. So the setting themselves may have been fanciful but it felt real, you could imagine yourselves living there.

Big ideas…

This is part of the real joy of science fiction, stories that can cover big ideas about what it means to be human. Sure, sometimes it was done via the usual ‘oh look at these aliens who have this one big issues that totally is just there for us to do social commentary’ episodes, but they looked at them which many shows and books do not.

Few other mediums look to understand or challenge so many ideas as sci-fi does.

…and small ones too!

But I also enjoyed episodes and stories that focused on very human elements, small parts about relationships, trust, small little stories about the characters. A great science fiction story should have both, a story that is just about the big idea can feel hollow as there aren’t the small human stories there to add depth. And one that focus on the small parts can often feel like it has no message or isn’t going anywhere.

Space battles!

I mean who doesn’t love watching awesome space craft battle it out in epic, if unrealistic, fights.

No drowning you in technical terms

Sure they often threw a good bit of technobabble out, but it rarely formed a key part of the stories and when it did they were there as good old MacGuffins (warning TV tropes link, only click if you have a few hours to spare).

For many written sci-fi stories the technology often seems to be the focus, including many elaborate descriptions of said tech and countless new terms dropped on the reader without context.

I don’t like that, I like a story that is grounded in realistic science but that doesn’t require a huge amount of scientific understanding from the reader. The technology and science should be part of the setting, not the whole story to me.

I know there will be fans of the genre who will disagree with me about that, and a lot of time is spent discussing how hard/realistic the science in many stories is, but this is just my personal preference for what sci-fi stories should be like.

Humour!

May not be an obvious part of why I’d love the sci-fi stories I do but it feels like an integral part to me. Because science fiction often covers very tough or important subjects, having the characters in a story piss around or have a laugh from time to time can help pace things and also keep them down to earth. We humans are very good at finding humour in harsh and difficult situations, and having characters who can’t crack a joke or smile when times are down never feels very realistic.

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So there you go, the big reasons why I love the science fiction stories I do. I’m sure you’ve noticed that the above very much focus on story and character over the science in the setting and that is true of the books i’m writing as well. I hope this has been informative.

Me and Science Fiction: My Definition of the Genre

Last entry in this series can be found here

Before I go into more depth in this series about recent space opera books I’ve read, more on things I like/don’t like in them, issues that are important to me and some of the themes that will be touched upon in the series I’m working on, I feel it is important to state my definitions of what is fantasy and what is science fiction.

Now to people who are casual fans of the genre this would seem to be an easy thing to define right, one is set in a made up world with dragons or magic or elves and the other takes place in space or the future. However, having started to follow parts of the science fiction blog community and some of the fan forums out there I’ve realised how important these definitions are to people and how they shape their views on both genres.

My definitions can be summed up as:

  • Fantasy – a genre that uses tales from our past and a world view based on human history and our collective past, or even the present, to tell stories. Remember that Tolkien based his works on old myths and legends, mostly Scandinavian.
  • Science fiction – a genre that uses future or skewed present settings to look at humanity and our development from the perspective of how we will progress.

So to me the two serve as a counterpoint, one reaching into our past or our myths and legends to tell tales. The other has its eye firmly on the future looking to tell stories about how progress may or is affecting our species.

I have to reiterate these are my views on how to define both genres, and obviously there will be overlap at the edges. Other people will have different views, this is just mine. You can of course check out the Wikipedia definition, but I personally quite like this long essay by the critic Paul Kincaid

There one big thing to note about the definitions above, technology or the amount of science in a story is not mentioned in the one for science fiction. I know there are a lot of people out for who both of those are vitally important but to me they are less so. I personally dislike stories that focus on the technology or scientific parts of things to the detriment of the plot and characters. To me those are how you show the world that has been built and how it differs and the message it has. Science of course has its role in the genre, it inspires many of the possible changes and futures that stories explore, but to focus on the particulars of the science itself misses the point as far as I’m concerned.

Science fiction to me is all about looking forward, trying to build stories about where we might go. They may project us into the far future or into strange worlds built by technology but they should fundamentally have something to say about who we are as a species. They should craft tales with characters and plots that draw people into believable, they don’t have to be realistic, worlds and galaxies. The stories are about us and should be full of people we can relate as they go through whatever crazy or mundane events are happening.

Science fiction is about looking forward or seeing how far a change to our society or technology could take us and then see what that says about us, and that’s why I love it.

You might think this doesn’t relate to too many of the series I talked about in my last post but it does. Sure some episodes in those were about the big awesome battles or cool effect, but the vast majority of the time they had a message about us as all good stories do. They told us something about compassion, sorrow, happiness, despair, and much more just in a setting that allowed those stories we have heard before be told in a different way. That is why I love this genre.

I hope that my books will be able to tell stories that talk to people about being human, and also about hope and a setting a thousand years in the future that people will be drawn into.

Next time, as I mentioned briefly earlier, I will be talking about some books I have read recently and what I did like as well as what I didn’t, and how those will relate to the kind of writing style I am aiming for and the kind of stories I want to tell.