Internal Consistency– the unbreakable rule in science fiction and fantasy

I like to find my way around rules and ideas in storytelling and I enjoy it when others do so as well. Often what we call rules are little more than ideas that usually work, but there are a set of rules that you must be very aware of and never break. This are the internal rules of the story that you set up.
This is of course extra important when you are dealing with science fiction and fantasy that have internal rules that often break the rules of the world as we know it, but they aren’t the only one. You can’t write a romance set in the 18th century and then have one of the characters call for help on a cell phone.
An example of a movie that fails to do this as well as it should is “Next”. The main character can see two minutes into the future, except when it is directly connected to a specific woman then he can see farther. As the movie goes on though this rule are more and more ignored. The writers were aware of it of course and attempted to write around it but at least for me they weren’t successful.
Perhaps the most frustrating of internal consistency being tossed out the window is in the end of movies where the heroes have been trying unsuccessfully to stop a plot then at the end something often not as interesting as the first works because it is time for the movie to be over. You knew how long the movie needed to be when you started, why not set up the ending?
For science fiction we run into the collective amnesia syndrome when it comes to technology. Some technology, superpower, or other element is on the show. Perhaps a time machine, or a character who can heal people with her blood, but everyone seems to conveniently forget that when the time comes. They have the time show episode and then no one bothers suggesting that perhaps the solution to the problem this week might be using the time machine from last week, and while I understand you can’t expect the writers to always see this, and you wouldn’t want them to fall back on the same technology to solve every solution why not simply explain why it doesn’t work rather than simply pretending it doesn’t exist?
In the end most of the time people will accept any stretch of logic so long as it is written into the basic premise of the show, but nothing will turn of readers and viewers of a show faster than the writers ignoring the rules that they set up, so while the rules of writing can be ignored, the rules of your writing can’t.

Mars and Science Fiction

There is something about mars that catches the attention of science fiction writers. Perhaps it is because in so many ways it is like earth. Pictures from the surface of the planet almost feel like pictures of a desert on earth. Because of this nearly every genre of science fiction from short stories to video games and comic books has used Mars as a setting or had characters from mars.
Some of the most famous uses of Mars are in classic science fiction. There are a few reasons for this. Telescope technology had allowed us to begin to glimpses the planet but not enough to know what it was really like. This type of ambiguity is the heart of science fiction.
Perhaps the most famous of these books is “The Martian Chronicles” by Ray Bradbury. This series of short stories tells the story of men coming to mars, meeting Martians, building a civilization and eventually leaving mars. But it is only the tip of the iceburg. Heinlein wrote “Stranger in a Strange Land” about a man raised by Martians returning to earth and Isaac Asimov wrote “The Martian Way”. In fact nearly every great science fiction writer of that Era had at least one story with Martians.
Once television and movies appeared there were even more stories. Invasions from mars were almost common in stories like War of the Worlds but eventually as we grew to understand the planet a little better it became about exploration, though these stories often didn’t work out well, or seeing mars as a new frontier almost always exploited by corporations like in “Total Recall” which mixed ancient mars technology, paranoia and an evil corporation all together into one story.
Comic books had their own share of mars stories and characters. Perhaps the most famous of those was the Martian Manhunter. This character has become a major character and one that came about in large part because of the fascination of mars in the popular culture.
In more recent years video games have also began to use mars as a setting. Often using the same ideas in the other genres. “Red Faction: Guerilla” have you on a mars that has began to be terraformed fighting for Mars freedom. This is reminiscent of the battles for mars in both Total Recall and Babylon 5, including the use of ancient Martian technology.
No matter what media science fiction comes in it remains fascinated by the planet mars and if we are perseverant and willing to take a few risks perhaps someday we can fulfill some of the dreams of these science fiction authors. We can walk and even live on the surface of mars and I believe we will because we are a species who has constantly conquered new environments and we aren’t likely to stop now.

mars, 2580 by ~shardanas on deviantART

Robots, emotions and science fiction

Robots have been a part of science fiction almost since the beginning. You can even make the argument that Frankenstein’s monster is in some ways a robot and that story helped set up one of the most important uses for robots in science fiction, as a way to examine humans and human emotions more carefully and they have been foils for human emotion ever since.
One early example is the 1938 story Helen O’loy by Lester del Rey. What this story does that is brilliant is that it isn’t the robot in the story that is having trouble with the emotions, the reader simply assumes it is because of a general prejudice towards robots. This story is dated some as the idea of a wife being largely a servant exists but she is also the emotional core of the story and helps us examine human emotion not because she doesn’t have them but because of our own assumptions.
More famous is Isaac Asimov’s “Bicentennial Man”. This is almost certainly the influence for Data on Star Trek. The robot in “Bicentennial Man” is more of an accident than Data and it takes him longer to discover what he wants but the ideas are similar. He has to fight for his freedom, fight for his rights and eventually has to fight to be declared a man.
Both of these characters allow us to examine human emotions in a unique way because we have characters who don’t take them for granted. Having a typical character speak of these emotions the way the robots do would be odd. We all know what the emotions are yet never discuss them in clinical terms while this is the only way a robot can really understand them. This leads to the question that if emotion is programmed into someone are they real and how can we say that emotions like a parents love for a child aren’t in some way programmed in?
More recently the Cylons have been used in large part this way. Slaves to humanity they rise up to become their own race but they have learned the lessons of humanity too well and they seek revenge. As the Cylons become characters on the show rather than enemies we begin to examine their motivations and ideas in a way that would be difficult with humans. We get arguments about turning off their free will, and why they feel the emotions they have that gives us new dimensions and in the end it seems that the humans realize that they really aren’t different. They have the ability to make choices and that makes them as human as anyone.
Emotions are tricky when writing. The authors desire to examine why people feel the way they do is confronted by the desire to make people act and think naturally and robots are an excellent way to allow for both.

Harlan Ellison

Harlan Ellison is one of the most interesting people in science fiction. It seems that in nearly every story you hear about him he is upset with someone or something, from filing lawsuits against Star Trek to fighting with various people across the science fiction, yet there is far more to this man than someone who is abrasive and willing to start a fight. He is willing to give praise when he thinks it due and is clearly a brilliant man who has spent his life writing fantastic stories.

Harlan Ellison was born on May 27, 1934 in Cleveland Ohio. He has been a professional writer for most of that time, publishing hundreds of short stories. Much of what he has written is science fiction but he has in no way limited himself to the genre branching out into other fields as well as writing for television and movies.

Perhaps his most famous work is the Star Trek Episode “City on the Edge of Forever” and though the story was changed considerably, to its detriment if you ask Harlan, it still holds much of his vision. What it lost was a story of drug dealing aboard the Enterprise that was lost because it didn’t fit Roddenberry’s vision of Star Trek. The original script was eventually released, but even through all of this “City on the Edge of Forever” Is considered by many to be the best episode of the Original Star Trek series and possible Star Trek itself.

Harlan has written only a handful of novels when compared to his work on short stories. This is likely the reason that his name is not as well known as some of the others of his time period and skill. One of the most famous of those short stories is “A Boy and His Dog” which was turned into a movie of the same name. Both book and movie are filled with dark humor and are extremely fun so long as you like extremely dark humor.

Controversy seems to be one of the defining characteristics of Harlan Ellison’s life. One of the more common of these ccontroversies is the use of the pseudonym Cordwainer Bird on any project in which he feels his work was mangled beyond repair by Hollywood executives. He has also claimed that Terminator was taken from two ideas he wrote for the outer Limits and was fired from Disney studios on his first day for joking about making an adult feature staring the cartoon characters.

In 2006 Harlan Ellison was given the title of Grandmaster of Science Fiction by the Science Fiction and Fantasy writers of America. Harlan lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife Susan.

Visit his Homepage

Three great science fiction stories with religious themes

Science fiction is tailor made to discuss big ideas and ideas that are too controversial to discuss in the normal means. The intersection of these two points is religion and because of this, many of the greatest stories and novels use religion as one of their central points. Here are some of my favorite science fiction stories that discuss religion.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

If the themes of religion in these books were more centralized it would likely be higher on the list but most of the mentions of religion I these books are simply swipes at the ideas something that would bother me if it weren’t so funny. Yet many of the mentions of religion in these stories are devilishly funny. Perhaps the best is at the beginning of most of the books. “In the Beginning the Universe Was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered a bad move.” He then goes on to discuss how many people think it was created by some sort of God.

The Star by Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke often wrote about religion and his story Childhood’s End is one of the best stories about religion but The Star is even more to the point. This is a story about a Jesuit Priest who has went on a trip with a survey team to an exploded star. Something he sees there makes him question his very religion. Any more than that would ruin the fun of the story but if you haven’t read it and have any interest in religion you should.

(It’s not all that long and the story is here)

Contact by Carl Sagan

After reading “Contact” it is almost hard to understand how so many books that discuss first contact ignore religion. His is a huge part of humanity and though contact with alien races wouldn’t necessarily change the beliefs it would certainly impact religion. Although there are other things going on in “Contact” one of the most central themes is religious and what is remarkable is how fair it really is. This isn’t Carl Sagan proving religion is for stupid people, it’s him thinking about the ideas of religion carefully.

Science fiction is full of stories like these. Some, like “Stranger in a Strange Land” and “Lords of Light” and even “Dune” to some extent involve characters becoming sorts of gods while there are still more that question how the world and the universe came to be. TV and movies also use it well as a central theme in stories like “Deep Space 9″ and “Battlestar Galactica” religion comes up often and we will almost certainly continue to see religion in science fiction because the question of God is one that will never be fully answered, and by nature of the theme the best place to think and look about it is science fiction.

Flowers for Algernon: Short Story Review

“Flowers for Algernon” is the perfect example of what science fiction can do better than any other genre. By using science as a instigator of massive changes in Charley mental state it allows the author, Daniel Keyes, to examine human intellect, the desire for knowledge, love, sexuality and more in ways that could never be achieved in more traditional stories, allowing us in the end to know more about Charley than we ever could have in those stories.
“Flowers for Algernon” is the story of Charley a janitor with an IQ of 68 who wants to be smarter. He is studying at night to learn to read and write but even that simple task is nearly impossible for him. He is given the opportunity to be given a experimental surgery that will triple his IQ.
The title character of the story, Algernon, is a laboratory mouse who has been given the procedure before Charley and regularly defeats Charley at tests of intelligence early in the story as well as being an indicator throughout the story of where Charley is likely to end up.
This story is told through a journal kept by Charley. This is the key to this stories success. Charley as the narrator tells as much about his increases and eventually decreasing intelligence through the words he uses, spelling and punctuation as he does through the actual stories he tells. This keeps the focus of the story on what is important, Charley rather than attempting to deviate into other interesting but superfluous piece of the story.
There are numerous lessons and themes in this story but perhaps the most important is the reminder that people with low IQs are still people with feelings and emotions just like ours. This is most clearly seen in one of the stories Charley tells at the near peak of his intelligence of being in a restaurant when a busboy drops a stack of dishes. Charley finds himself laughing with everyone else until he sees the look in the boy’s eyes and recognizes who he was previously. He then becomes angry, more at himself than anyone else.
It is this moment, along with the changing of how other people see Charley, that makes the end of this book less melancholy. In the end the effects of the operation wear off and Charley slowly reverts to his previous mental state, but even as he returns to who he was the emotional lessons seem to remain. Those who had made fun of him because they were smarter now understand better after he has, inadvertently, done the same to them.
This is one of the most powerful stories in science fiction in large part because it is so perfectly suited to the genre. Doing things that could not be realistically done in any other genre it examines the range of both human intellect and human emotion and the connections between them nearly perfectly.

Speculative fiction, science fiction, sci-fi and syfy. What’s in a name?

I remember a few years ago when I first heard the term Speculative Fiction. I thought it was great and tried using it, and after a week I realized that as good as it might sound no one knew what I was talking about when I used the term. I would have to explain to them that it meant science fiction and fantasy every time. This led me to the conclusion that it’s pointless to try to change the name of something so embedded in the culture especially when there isn’t anything wrong with the name to begin with.
But it isn’t just a question of using speculative fiction or science fiction, there is of course the controversy of the name sci-fi too, or even Syfy, though I’m not going to get into that. I know that there are those who dislike the term sci-fi because sci-fi is the lasers and robots cartoons on Saturday morning while science fiction is something better. I don’t mind this distinction and even use it myself on occasion.
So, that brings me back to my central point. Should we be trying to change the name of science fiction and fantasy to speculative fiction? Would that help convince literature professors that Dune is a valuable piece of literature or would they simply continue to pick out certain books say that they aren’t science fiction and so are good enough while ignoring the rest?
At the heart of speculative fiction is the question “what if?” so I ask myself, what if everyone who loved science fiction began to insist it was called speculative fiction. Assuming it worked perfectly there would be some changes. The shelves in the book stores would eventually be changed to say speculative fiction rather than science fiction, which would help eliminate the bizarre situations where you would find “The Hobbit” directly under the title science fiction. (Although it did lead me to an interesting story idea about genetically engineering hobbits).
Beyond that though I don’t know that it would matter. I have trouble believing that many literature professors would be fooled into discussing the metaphors and themes of “Ender’s Game” in class even though there is plenty to discuss. They would simply look down their noses at a marginally more accurate name for a genre the same way they look down on science fiction now.
In the end the only real solution for the stigma attached to science fiction is for us to stop being embarrassed by enjoying sci-fi, because in large part the reason that people look down on science fiction is because the people who enjoy it look down on it. Often we are unable to see just how good these books are and if we can’t explain why science fiction is valuable without changing the name why should we expect that they know?

Defining Science Fiction

Science fiction is one of the most difficult genres of literature to define. It can stretch in time from stories that happen in the distant past to thousands and even millions of years in the future, it can have adventure, romance, comedy and more. And yet it is often reduced to being called simple escapist fiction or on the other extreme considered to be too difficult to understand.

Often people think that it is technology that defines science fiction. Often this is true, but science fiction is more than robots and laser guns. Yet not all science fiction needs to be like this. Hard science fiction stories like 2001 has very little technology that isn’t available now , yet this book is one of the greatest stories in science fiction, and often the addition of the technology doesn’t take over a good story.

The question of escapist fiction is one that is often spoken of when discussing science fiction. This is said with an assumption that there is something negative about being escapist but while the derivate nature of that statement is absurd so is the statement. Some of the most thought provoking and important fiction in the English language is science fiction. These are stories that explore situations like racism, genocide, war, peace and more.

The other argument that is often leveled against science fiction is that it is too difficult. The idea that you need to understand science in order to read science fiction. That it somehow requires a great deal of knowledge to understand. That it is somehow difficult to read. There is certainly some science fiction that this is true with, but even science fiction that requires understanding almost always has that information in its pages so you can learn while enjoying truly good fiction.

In the end science fiction, or speculative fiction, that also includes fantasy can be better defined by a single question than the technology, or magic. That question is “What if”. Not all stories that ask this question are science fiction or fantasy but this is the question of science fiction. What if aliens contacted us? What if a man could travel in time? What if people developed super power? What if robots tried to take over the world?

Defining science fiction isn’t easy and defining it as anything except technology is even more difficult. Perhaps this is why some of the more interesting science fiction authors, such as Kurt Vonnegut have denied that what they write is science fiction at all but the question “What if” is often the real key to understanding this genre.

Science Fiction Author Primer

More than in many genres the freedom allowed in science fiction leads to the necessity of finding good authors. Without knowing who the author of a story was it is difficult to have any idea what to expect. Consider the story of a detective investigating the suspected murder of a human by a robot. Written by Philip K. Dick you have a tale of paranoia and questioning of reality, written by Isaac Asimov you have “I, Robot”, and both of these are good authors. So who are the authors the most famous science fiction authors, the ones who can be relied upon to tell a good story every time?

Starting at the beginning you have Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Their stories are sometimes a bit dated but they are almost always good stories with nearly every element of more modern science fiction in their pages at some point. With these writers you can travel to the center of the earth, the moon, through time, meet alien and more.

Throughout the early part of the century there were many good science fiction authors but the golden age of science fiction didn’t start until the late 1930’s. At this point man began to understand his own ability to destroy himself and the power at his hands. The world seemed on the edge of either destruction or a golden age and we didn’t know which. At this time I like to go with the ABC route of authors: Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke. This leaves out a great many excellent authors out but is a fantastic place to start.

Isaac Asimov is one of the most prolific authors in history. Asimov wrote over 400 books including “Foundation”, “I, Robot” and “Nightfall”, as well as a great many short stories, and numerous non-fiction works on science.

Ray Bradbury didn’t limit himself purely to science fiction sometimes writing stories that were horror but he is best known for “The Martian Chronicles” and “Fahrenheit 451″ two of the best known science fiction stories of all time.

Arthur C. Clarke is a British author and one of the harder writers of hard science fiction. Often sticking with stories nearer in the future he is best known for “Childhood’s End” and “2001: A Space Odyssey” and many others.

There are simply too many great authors of science fiction to list them all and at some point you will learn the style of story you want to hear. Asimov often deals more with psychology than hard science, while Frank Herbert will give you every detail of the world and Robert A. Heinlein will give entertaining wish fulfillment.

There are fantastic modern authors as well but their body of works is often much smaller and still growing. In repayment for often having less work they are able to relate their stories more specifically to the world we live in now. Two of the better ones are Orson Scott Card, who wrote “Ender’s Game”, and Neil Stephenson who wrote “Snow Crash”.

Any time you try a new author it is like meeting a new person. You may like them but do you have anything in common? Do your views meet, your ideas of fun? Yet meeting people is necessary or your world will quickly grow very small so pick up books from the most famous of science fiction authors and see which you like.

Science Fiction and Fantasy Ideas

have always said that ideas are easy to come up with and that even with the same core idea that no two writers are going to create the same story. Yet often when you hear ideas from others they sound better than your own. This isn’t because they are better, simply because they are different.

With all that in mind I decided to put down a few ideas for science fiction, fantasy and horror ideas and let anyone who wants them have them.

1> The poor members of a fantasy village are caught in the middle as two wizards fight over the mine of magical gems found near their village.

2> While their parents sleep in cryogenic suspension a group of children live aboard a spaceship training for the day they arrive at their new world.

3>A small group of vampires use wars as a cover for their hunting

4> An experiment has fractured time. Each character in the story is now experiencing time in a different way making it nearly impossible to work together to solve the problem.

5> Given the magical ability to shapeshift a wild animal deals with his new intelligence and power along with his natural instincts

Hope that something here sparked something in your mind.