How do you write science fiction or fantasy? Just like any other fiction, it takes two main ingredients, a story, and a setting. One usually pops into the writer’s head before the other, but both are required. Where science fiction and fantasy differ from mainstream fiction is the setting of the story. Which the author must build. Think of it as moving into a ready-built home, versus constructing your own house on a vacant lot. Whether you drag an Airstream or doublewide trailer onto that lot and call it good, or build a fifty-room mansion is up to you.
Many of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories started out as cowboy tales, or short stories set in African jungles or India’s northwest frontier, which didn’t sell. Howard recast them as sword and sorcery adventure fiction. And, abracadabra, instant success. With his book The Empire of the Atom, AE Van Vogt (allegedly) borrowed extremely heavily from the novel I, Claudius to set essentially the history of the early Roman empire in space. Some have pointed out that the popular Avatar series is merely Dances with Wolves, on another planet. These writers started with a good story, and built worlds around them.
It can work the other way around as well. Issac Asimov imagined a detective team consisting of a human and a robot, and penned a series of novels (The Caves of Steel (1953), The Naked Sun (1956), and The Robots of Dawn (1983)) where this pair solve crimes three thousand years in the future. Gene Roddenberry originally pitched the Star Trek series as “Wagon Train to the stars.” The Firefly TV series presupposes a backdrop similar to the American western frontier in the wake of a bitter civil war, but stretching across an interplanetary scale. JRR Tolkien dreamed up a world filled with characters from north European myth and legend, then started them upon quests worthy of such a grand setting.
Necessary for both mainstream and speculative fiction are characters the reader/viewer can believe are real. Characters are the glue which holds story and setting together. Ironically, that often involves making nonhumans (robots, aliens, elves, dragons, and monsters) more like us. Or, at least understandable in their alienness. Often, robots, like Data in Star Trek, or Asimov’s Bicentennial Man, aspire to be human, even with our inherent flaws. Alien races, whether in fantasy or science fiction, are excellent props to hold up a mirror to humanity. The reactions to what those mirrors reveal are an effective way to explore ourselves. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land follows a boy raised by Martians struggling to find his place among humans. Real, “human” characters are what keeps a fantasy story from devolving into a dry history lesson or a science fiction tale from being a boring physics lecture.
Story, setting, characters. Like many things, it’s difficult, but simple. Science fiction and fantasy demand some amount of world building. More than other genres, but that also allows a greater degree of freedom in telling the tale. Not even the sky is the limit.
Ray Tabler is a retired engineer and author, originally from Louisville, Kentucky. He chased the north-bound dollar to Michigan because of a tragic addiction to a steady paycheck, where he married a lovely Yankee girl. Several decades later, despite the siren call of warmer climes, Ray might be permanently lodged in the frozen north. Ray’s short
fiction can be found in the pages of The Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Baen’s Universe, and Cosmic Crime Stories. He has published four novels (A Grand Imperial War, A Grand Imperial Heir, Fool’s Paradise, and The Diesel-Powered Starship) with Histria Books. A couple more novels (Smitty’s Guide to Interstellar Bartending, and Sideways in Noir-From the Casefiles of Joe Briggs, Crosstime Private Eye) are currently being detailed before hitting the showroom floor at Nazca Press.
Website: https://raytabler.com/
Substack: https://raytabler.substack.com/