Writing Science Fiction

Science fiction is the 'last resort' - the genre you turn to when you can't tell the story any other way. The hallmark of science fiction is 'what if?' - what if we weren't alone in the universe? what if machines got so smart that people forgot how to think? what if people were on a spaceship for so many generations that they forgot it was a ship and thought it was the world?

Yes, you can write a science fiction murder mystery, a science fiction romance, or a science fiction coming-of-age tale. And people do, and they're great. Does your coming-of-age tale NEED to be set four hundred years into the future? then do it.

The Cardinal Rule in Writing Science Fiction - Get the Science Right

Science Fiction fans demand rigor in their science. There are certain conventions that can be posited and then ignored. If Faster-than-light travel is necessary for your story, you can name it ('the Jump' or whatever) and then just use it. No one expects you to spend a lot of time justifying the science. But if you use it, you must use it consistently. If it takes ten days to get to Alpha Prime from Beta Zed, it must always take ten days. If aliens open a convenient wormhole from Prime to Zed, there had better be a pretty good reason for them to do so.

Mary Doria Russell wrote The Sparrow, an absolutely stunning first contact story featuring Jesuits sending an expedition to a close star that showed signs of sentient life around it. She was ruthlessly pilloried by the science fiction purists for her rather haphazard use of Einsteinian time-dilation - that is, that more time passes on Earth than for the travellers, and how that impacts the travellers upon their return home. Fortunately for her, her novel and its sequel Children of God found a significant cross-over audience, which it truly deserved.

World Building

The most characteristic difference between writing science fiction and writing mainstream contemporary fiction is that in sci-fi, you have to invent your world, your time and your culture literally from scratch.

This is the allure to many sci-fi writers; the ability to play god and create a world and universe of their own. But the novice usually doesn't think things through. Even Old Timers often can't project themselves far enough into their construct to break out of here-and-now thinking - The Great Isaac Asimov was such a creature of the 'fifties that he actually wrote about a farflung future that had men doing all the derring-do and women as housewives. (He did expand his vision considerably before his death; Asimov was nothing if not adaptable.)

Worldbuilding is such a significant part of writing science fiction and fantasy that it deserves its own article.

Novel or Short Story?

While there aren't as many markets for sci-fi short stories as there were when I was growing up, still a number of magazines exist that actively encourage new writers. Short stories are the best way to break into science fiction as a result. If your story is novel-sized yet lends itself to an episodic treatment, consider breaking it down into a series of short stories that can be later collected and fused into a novel.

All Rules of Conventional Fiction Apply

Even if you are writing science fiction, that doesn't mean that all the other rules of writing fiction can be forgotten. Character development, attention to point of view and pacing are as important in science fiction as they are in any other literary work.

So in effect, writing science fiction is harder than writing 'plain' fiction, since you have to know how to write fiction AND how to world-build and all the conventions and mores of the science fiction genre.