Sci-fi and Patrick Moore (by sarah)
I have an ambition to write science fiction and this is something I really struggle with unfortunatly. I find I can easily write romance of all things which just upsets me as I hate romance but its what spills out of the pen.
Then there is horror - these are the stories that are of the level to be published, these are the stories I wish I couldn't write - I write them becuase I have nightmares of a type that cripple me with fear. I have vivid nightmares of the type that seem emensly real and the only way I have of dealing with them of not being parralised by the fear is to put the light on and write them down. I write the 'bones' and then 'feeling' of the dream and by the time I have done this there is a fledgling story which needs to be written if I am to sleep again. I don't like these stories and have tended to site upon them (ie not send them off to publlishers) even though they are the ones my writing teachers say are ready to go and are very publishable.
But I don't want to write Romance and Horror, I want to write scifi and fantasy but I have issues with both. Fantasy I completely fail to write every time I try it turns into scifi and grounds to a holt. I am planing at some point to write a seperate post on this as I think its an interesting phenominon. Scifi - scifi - this is where my true literary heart lays so why can't I write it?
Do I lack ideas?
No!
I have if anything too many ideas the brim over sometimes and now have carefully planned out story lines and books of facts and this is part of the problem - I can't write 'star trek' it has to be correct, it has to all be able to work and therefore I find myself outlining and even having written half a novel and then go - how is the science behind this going to work and so I find myself needing time travel of a specific sort that may not actually7 be time travel and then I find I'm getting books out on maths and infinities and posting questions on face book etc... it needs to all work. If I put in an ancient heating system thats all pipes and things - it may only need to spring a leak and thats its sole purpose in the book but to write it correctly I find I'm picking Als brains and looking covertly at his engerneering books (you know the old ones he collects that tell you how to build sugar refinaries and stuff).
If people are to be on space shipes they need to be viable and the planets need to be correct too and this one cuases me alot of problems - I am I think too close to this science I can see how quickly it is moving this makes me fearful of using anything in our actual solar system. Possible other planets not a problem but our solar system, actaul named galaxies they are a problem for me. At the same time they draw me - I find myself reading Astronomy Now, Sky at Night magizine, New Scientist and any old National Geographics I can find. I do this for several reasons - astronomy I am interested in and need to understand to tell the Scouts about for their astronomy badge. I also feel that being currently stuck at home but wanting to go back to college and wanting to be an astrobiologist means that I need to at least know whats going on with space missions and this is the easiest and cheapest way I have found.
But mainly I read these mags to get facts for stories in progress and also to find new concepts and ideas for stories. Now often in my writing classes I am told I worry far too much about fact but it really really bugs me when it is obvious an author hasn't even tried to find dtuff that they could have easily found out. Hence I write the story about an old man and the second world war - I go and research it. I have a teenage boy making a lighting system with LEDs I find out about it, I even have a little LED soldering kit I want to make up just to get the feel right (though Al did get that for me for another reason ie I want to make LED lighting not sure which came first the story or the reality).
There is also the issue that people seem to think that Scifi is litratures poor uneducated cousin and I get this attitude a lot at the writing groups, thats what you write to make money and its easy becuase you can just make it all up - WRONG! Worlds have to seem real, you need the reader to suspende disbelief but if you jump all over the place and make anything possible within the confines of one story you might as well just say - that god made it all ok (said like any films you've watched lately? I am legand by any chance?) This is a cop out this infuriates readers, like having a fortuatuos earthquake that just so happens to burry the bad guy but leave all the good guys with a hoared of buried treasure (I have noticed that American childrens films are very very guilty of this sort of plot line.)
Not a good story, at least not for me. Though I would say that the story should not be swamped in facts they should be there as an under current not mentioned but affecting the scifi realm in the way physics does our own world, the way societial laws govern the social groups within it. It is pattern building it, it is sytems evolving for me all over again. Writing this stuff is like running a computer simulation for me though with far more variables than anything we currently have could deal with.
I love the old style scifi as well and love trying to work out what would happen if certain systems had been adopted instead of others, this was what I was trying to do whan I was informed that I was dipping in and out of the steam punk genre - I still havent managed to read any books from it. Alaric Also got me Snow Crash as I was apparently trying to write cyberpunk. The other thing I tend to be trying to write is a sort of social scifi i.e. I extrapolate one or two things from our own or other cultures - I take those things to varing degrees of extreme and see where logic takes me with veery human characters (though not necassarily human and sometimes mucking about with what characteristics are genetically there or not is fun too). But again all this takes thought and so these stories can not just appear on the page from nothing like the Romance or horror.
I have been worrying about trying to fit it all in with what is actually known and working with current theories when I opened Febuary's Sky at Night magizine - this is the third issue of the mag I have bought and I had just finished reading the first few articles and thinking well its not relaly helped advanced what I know but wow I've just had yet another idea for a story where is my pad and pen - oh yeah I'm in the bath :/ So I moved on to the next article which happened to be Patrick Moore talking about Scifi. This article has made me feel alot better about the fact I track down all those pesky little facts, in it he mentions all of the poeple I grew up with - the main authors dad used to read to me at night (and yes I did have nightmares when he read War of the Worlds to me at the age of 7). Of course I already knew that Jules Verne had based his stories on the science fact of the day as my dad had been telling me this from a very early age.
But it was probably the bit towards the end of the article that has got me thinking perhapse I am doing things the right way - he points out that with current scientific advancement great avenues of potential are opening up for writers. I hope to be a proper scifi writer one day. Alaric tends to write scifi too though his time is very very limited but what he has produced with his miticuouls planning and nested data structure of facts is mind blowingly brilliant (I am saying this objectively not as his wife) the imagery is fantastic and the concepts geniuos of course his reading speed is about twenty times faster than mine :/
This has made me slightly nervous though as he is mottoring through what is supposed to be a joint venture in scifi and I have writen nothing of this story yet and I am feelingabit duaghnted as to how I can match this vibrant energised style.
Apologies for such a waffly post and erm.. I probably should have put in more about Patrick Moore - oh well. If you are trying to write scifi its probably a good article to read to be honest.
Sat 19th Jan 2008 12:33 pm 
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By @ndy, Sat 19th Jan 2008 @ 2:46 pm
Hi,
Read "Stand on Zanzibar" by John Brunner.
By sarah, Tue 22nd Jan 2008 @ 10:06 am
I've added it to my list of books too read - I'm sort of stuck reading the art of the infinite at the moment 🙂