I ran the complete set of posts from this blog through the Wordle program. Wordle calculates word frequencies, translates them to physical sizes, and uses this information to lay out the most frequent words in interesting ways. The image below, therefore, shows you just what I talk about most in this blog. If you haven’t played with Wordle yet, it’s definitely worth ten minutes of your time.

Revealing, isn't it? (click for larger version)

Finally, part 5 of  my sci-fi writer’s manifesto: five simple statements intended to guide my writing. This is the full set.

1. Write only about what is real, or about what can reasonably be foreseen based on what is real.
2. Be honest about what is real and what is not real.
3. Do not write if you have nothing important to say.
4. Write in a clear, simple style, so as to be understood.
5. Look forward and outward from where we are to where we might one day be.

As before, please remember, I’m not saying these statements should apply to anyone except myself.

5. Look forward and outward from where we are to where we might one day be.

This precept is a bit different from the others. It is here because I am saddened by how much modern science fiction is inward-looking and even backward-looking. It is as if some sci-fi writers have given up on the science – even on the technology. They can’t understand it, they no longer have a vision of where it is taking us, and the complexities have become too much for them. They write ‘steampunk’ or other types of tale where technologies are simpler and more magical. They write for ‘young adult’ readers instead of grown-ups. They blur the lines between sci-fi and fantasy, or they write the same kinds of stories that were being written 30 or 50 years ago, barely updating the technology at all.

As a boy, when I read science fiction, it filled me with awe and wonder. I wanted to stand on the bridge of a starship and see the Milky Way spread out before me. I wanted to talk to intelligent robots. I wanted to meet alien explorers, find mysterious artefacts on the Moon, visit a ring world, or stand inside a Dyson sphere. I wanted, in short, to boldly go where no boy had gone before.

And I still want that!

Exploring ideas is fun. Exploring ideas at the same time as speculating about the future is a huge adventure. Science fiction should look towards the future, where our beliefs and our humanity will be challenged, but it should also look forward to the future, anticipating the magic of discovery and revelation with courage and an open mind.

Good sci-fi often engages with today’s issues, moving them into future or alternative scenarios so that they can be examined and laid bare. I really would like to think that readers today could get the stimulation of confronting tricky ethical, philosophical, personal and social problems in a genre where nothing is taboo and everything is fair game. Yet I also want people to share my sheer, bloody wonder at the Universe in all its magnificence and complexity. Only science fiction can take us into the heart of the breathtaking miracle of this world we inhabit, dazzling us with its enormity and splendour, while telling us marvellous tales about our own remarkable species and its struggles for existence, understanding, and a meaningful place in the cosmos.

Science fiction did all this and more for me and I feel bound to pay this precious gift forward.

And here is part 4 of  my sci-fi writer’s manifesto: five simple statements intended to guide my writing. This is the full set.

1. Write only about what is real, or about what can reasonably be foreseen based on what is real.
2. Be honest about what is real and what is not real.
3. Do not write if you have nothing important to say.
4. Write in a clear, simple style, so as to be understood.
5. Look forward and outward from where we are to where we might one day be.

As usual, please remember, I’m not saying these statements should apply to anyone except myself.

4. Write in a clear, simple style, so as to be understood.

This one is very easy to explain. It seems to me that writing is all about communication. You have a story to tell; you tell it. You have a point to make; you make it. There is nothing to be gained by obscuring your text and everything to be lost.

Except some people don’t seem to see it that way. They want to revel in ‘the beauty of language’ and so write flowery, tortuous sentences, filled with obscure words. They want to be poetical, or novel, or ‘clever’, so they write in convoluted, forced, often bizarre and ill-fitting metaphors. They want to be ambiguous, mysterious or ‘challenging’, so they write in an obfuscated, oblique, sometimes impenetrable style – especially at the end of the story for some reason. A lot of ‘serious’ literature seems to be written by people who would rather rhapsodise themselves into an orgasm of technical pyrotechnics, than plainly say what on Earth they set out to say – if it was anything at all.

Science fiction has always been a genre from which the worst excesses of ‘clever’ writing have, on the whole, been absent. That is not to say there have not been some first-class wordsmiths – J.G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula le Guin and Sherri Tepper all spring to mind. I’d swap you any one of these writers for a roomful of magical realists.

I’m not here suggesting that one should write for a reading age of ten, or to simplify any idea beyond its inherent level of difficulty. I’m only saying that playing around with words, sentences, or larger structures, at the expense of intelligibility, just to satisfy some aesthetic or theoretical notion of the writer, is self-indulgence at the expense of the reader. I believe that I should avoid it. I believe one of my primary goals as a writer should be to write clearly, in the interests of entertainment and of communication.

Over the past two days, I have published the first two parts of  my sci-fi writer’s manifesto: five simple statements intended to guide my writing. This is the full set.

1. Write only about what is real, or about what can reasonably be foreseen based on what is real.
2. Be honest about what is real and what is not real.
3. Do not write if you have nothing important to say.
4. Write in a clear, simple style, so as to be understood.
5. Look forward and outward from where we are to where we might one day be.

Today, I elaborate on the third item. As usual, please remember, I’m not saying these statements should apply to anyone except myself.

3. Do not write if you have nothing important to say.

I read too many books that leave me thinking, “Why did anybody bother writing that?” Almost all television drama has this effect. There is violence, humiliation, degradation, torture, rape, a thousand cruelties that seem to be inflicted for no purpose other than to titillate. The “high concept” description of such pieces would read like the typical description of a film in a TV listings magazine. “Destruction Vector: An ex-cop vigilante tracks down the cyborgs who killed his wife and who plan to destroy Mars with a stolen doomsday bomb.” These books might be well-written, they may be great stories, they may be page turners, but wouldn’t it be better if they were all that and said something interesting or worthwhile?

As with the impossible worlds problem (see yesterday’s post), the argument for pointless melodrama (or romance, or angst-ridden divorce stories) is that they’re fun. And again, they can be – especially if the writer shows some constraint on the rape and torture front. They can even be fun to write. But I would like to do more than this. I would like to be able to answer the question, “What is your book about?” with a statement of its idea rather than with a list of action scenes.

Fiction with a message, they say, is tedious and boring. If the characters become mouthpieces for the writer’s agenda, they become two-dimensional and unrealistic. Perhaps the people who say this are only remembering bad fiction, perhaps they have forgotten books like 1984 and Brave New World, The Martian Chronicles, and Fahrenheit 451.

Setting myself the task of saying something important isn’t all that hard. There are many things I’ve learned in life, many things I want to say. I feel I have a contribution to make to understanding the human condition. It sounds pompous and arrogant, I know, but there it is. What kind of a person would I be if I had learned nothing? How much of a waste would my life have been if I could contribute nothing? And what is writing for if it is not to communicate ideas?

Simple entertainment, filled with clichés instead of ideas, and platitudes instead of arguments, has its place. Someone once described television as “bedtime stories for tired adults.” I’ve used TV that way myself many a time and been grateful for it. But writing this kind of entertainment is not what I aspire to. I would like my writing to mean more, to myself and to others.

Yesterday, I published the first expansion on my sci-fi writer’s manifesto: five simple statements intended to guide my writing. This is the full set.

1. Write only about what is real, or about what can reasonably be foreseen based on what is real.
2. Be honest about what is real and what is not real.
3. Do not write if you have nothing important to say.
4. Write in a clear, simple style, so as to be understood.
5. Look forward and outward from where we are to where we might one day be.

Today, I elaborate on the second item. Remember, I’m not saying these statements should apply to anyone except myself.

2. Be honest about what is real and what is not real.

It is far too tempting, as a sci-fi writer, to use ideas, tropes, if you like, that are popular in the genre, even when you know that they are strongly contradicted by our current understanding of the universe. As an example, take two of the most pervasive of these ideas; faster-than-light (FTL) travel and psychic abilities – especially telepathy.

When Frank Herbert wrote Dune, when Ursula le Guin wrote The Left Hand of Darkness, the jury was still out on psychic powers. Sceptics disbelieved, but for most rational people, the possibility that telepathy, precognition, and so on, were real phenomena was taken quite seriously. It was reasonable, at the time, to consider future worlds in which the reality of such abilities had been established and where they were being used.

These days it is not reasonable. There has been so much research since then – tons and tons of it – good, solid, double-blind studies, that demonstrate that these abilities are imagined (or fraudulent) it would simply be dishonest to ignore it all. There is no theoretical basis for psychic abilities and all empirical tests have shown they do not exist.

The universal speed limit, which only electromagnetic radiation and gravity waves manage to achieve, and which nothing may exceed, is not quite in the same category as psychic abilities. While the limit on the speed of light may be a fundamental property of the geometry of space-time, we believe that that geometry itself may be distorted in the presence of mass or negative energy. This warping of space-time leaves open the possibility (however improbable!) of wormholes and other techniques for moving vast distances faster than light could under normal circumstances. It looks very much as if modern physics is on the verge of a deeper understanding of quantum reality, perhaps unifying quantum descriptions with relativity. ‘Hidden variable’ models for understanding the universe are still considered viable and, it seems to me, leave open the possibility of something like the ‘hyperspace’ of so many sci-fi writers’ dreams. While these ‘loopholes’ exist, I think it is fair to speculate on FTL technologies and their effects. However, if FTL travel is possible, it is definitely a long, long way beyond our current understanding.

If new findings close the loopholes, and FTL can be ruled out of the realms of possibility, sci-fi should drop it like a stone. It is part of my duty as a sci-fi writer to be abreast of theoretical developments in such areas and to treat the science behind these ideas with respect.

This particular injunction also has something to say about human psychology. As a writer, I want to be honest about my characters too. The first injunction of my five (write only about what is real) should keep me from creating unbelievable characters but I think there is more that needs to be done. People advise against creating characters that are “too good” or “too evil” because nobody is wholly one or the other. This is fine and has led to a spate of villains who love their cats, heroes who let someone down in a moment of weakness, and so on. But it doesn’t always lead to real human beings.

Human psychology is messy, and a lot of what drives us – the lust, the fear, the disgust, the indifference – is pretty ugly, especially in a protagonist your readers should be sympathising with. So, should you please the crowd, or should you tell it like it is? I intend to try to keep it real and keep it honest.

A while ago, I wrote my sci-fi writer’s manifesto: five simple statements intended to guide my writing. In case you missed them, here they are.

1. Write only about what is real, or about what can reasonably be foreseen based on what is real.
2. Be honest about what is real and what is not real.
3. Do not write if you have nothing important to say.
4. Write in a clear, simple style, so as to be understood.
5. Look forward and outward from where we are to where we might one day be.

At the time, I promised to elaborate on them and it’s about time I made good my promise. Since my elaborations turned out to be rather lengthy, I shall present them one at a time over the next few days. Remember, I’m not saying these statements should apply to everyone, only to myself.

1. Write only about what is real, or about what can reasonably be foreseen based on what is real.

This first injunction is as applicable to literary fiction, crime fiction, romance, or any other genre, as it is to science fiction. I mean it, above all, to refer to what is real about people, about our psychology. I also mean it to refer to what is real about the Universe, about the physical reality of which we are part.

It seems to me that the most important aspect of any work of fiction is that it explores the way people of particular types, with particular backgrounds, might react in circumstances the author invents. The whole point of this exercise is invalidated if the world in which the characters find themselves is not physically possible, or if the characters and the society they inhabit are not psychologically possible.

The first case (the world is impossible) is not quite so bad.  The use of impossible worlds entitles the reader to ask, “So what?” If we cannot be shrunk to the size of microbes – and we can’t – what is the point in exploring our reaction to it? It will never happen, so it doesn’t matter.

The usual argument is that it is just fun to imagine such situations, and the reader gets to play a little ‘what if?’ game with the author. I don’t really mind this, and, of course, it can be fun if done well. Lord of the Rings was fun. But such writing, because it doesn’t deal with reality, will always be at the trivial end of the spectrum of speculative fiction. This, for me, includes all worlds that include magic, or supernatural beings of any kind. It does not necessarily include alternative worlds. An alternative world where the laws of physics are the same as our own (or plausibly different) but where people in the past have made different choices, seems as reasonable a speculation as any future world does.

The psychological reality of the characters in a story is a far more serious matter. Every writer worth their salt will strive to make their characters as ‘believable’ as possible. Without psychologically valid characters, psychologically valid societies, without real people reacting believably in relationships that make sense, a story is a waste of time. Worse, it is a travesty and a distortion that should never have been written. Sadly, a lot of speculative fiction (like so much at the ‘pulp’ end of all genres) is of this sort.

A special problem here for science fiction is when it deals with aliens. I am happy to suppose that intelligent aliens exist elsewhere in the Universe. On current estimates by astronomers, there may be between 10 billion and 80 billion Earth-like planets in our own little galaxy. Given this, I would be surprised if sentient aliens did not exist.  And, allowing for faster-than-light travel (see injunction number 2, coming soon) I’m happy to accept the physical plausibility of stories in which people and aliens meet. It is the psychological plausibility of aliens which is such a problem because we simply cannot know the mind of a creature we have not yet encountered.

Or can we? I think the answer is yes, to some extent. We know, for example, that any replicant is subject to the laws of evolution, that any living creature must obey the laws of thermodynamics, gravity, and so on. These physical laws place enormous constraints on what kinds of aliens are possible, how they will be adapted to their environments, how their senses will work, how their locomotion can be achieved, and so on. While the constraints are massive, there is still plenty of room for speculation, but, when dealing with alien minds, it is incumbent on the sci-fi writer to ensure he or she does not invent something that would violate those constraints.

To see the difference between unconstrained, unreal speculation and constrained, reality-based speculation, consider the freedom the fantasy writer has. Creatures of magic (vampires, werewolves, gods, fairies, demons, and so on) aren’t necessarily subject to physical laws, evolution need not touch them, sensory and psychological limitations need not apply. (In fact, it is remarkable that, given this freedom, creatures in fantasy works exhibit such human psychologies!)

Finally, the bit in the statement about “what can reasonably be foreseen” is to do with predicting the future. A sci-fi writer should be as constrained by what is real here as he or she is elsewhere. The future is not a magic realm. Future technologies might indeed seem like magic were we to encounter them, but they are not. They are technologies which have been developed from the ones we know, and have emerged from sciences which themselves have developed from the ones we know. They will be constrained by the same laws of the Universe that we now experience. It is too easy to conjure up technologies that bear no relationship to the science we now know. (I remember reading a sci-fi story in the sixties, where a character with a hand-held laser weapon sliced right through the Earth with it! It’s true that lasers were new and exciting then, but the laws of thermodynamics weren’t.)

I believe it is a useful constraint for the sci-fi writer to place on his or her self to ensure that future technologies  are either predictable from what we now know, or are at least consistent with reality as we currently understand it. Our science may have moved beyond Newtonian mechanics, but objects still move in a straight line at at constant speed unless acted on by a force. We simply have a better definition now of what a straight line means! To give oneself more freedom than that is to risk crossing the line into unrealistic and magical invention, invalidating the primary purpose of the work.

My spirit guide

Recently, a friend of mine urged writers to develop an ‘Artistic Life Purpose Statement’ and boldly offered her own. Now, I’ve done ‘the vision thing’ quite a lot in my time. I was once a manager in IBM and I’ve been a business consultant. Most ‘vision statements’ are a complete waste of time – platitudes, motherhood, and empty words to make corporate trolls feel good about themselves.  So I look on the whole enterprise with a jaundiced eye.

Yet I’ve been having trouble with my writing lately. In the past few months, I’ve started and stopped three different novels. Each one got to about 20,000 words before I asked myself, is this really the novel I want to be writing? The answer in each case was ‘No.” It isn’t that they weren’t good stories, or in the wrong genre, or that I didn’t think they would be good, readable books. It’s something altogether more obscure and disturbing, a feeling that they’re taking me in the wrong direction, that there was a better book I could be writing.

So, taking my friend’s advice, I went on my own little vision quest. I live near the top of a mountain, so it was no problem to go out and climb to a high place, surrounded by massive granite boulders – house-sized if you can picture such massy presences – to find myself a spot where I could look out over wide vistas of rolling gum forest beneath bottomless, blue skies, and just sit and think.

What I came up with wasn’t really a vision, or, indeed, a statement of purpose. It was more a manifesto, a short set of statements of belief that I would like to guide my future work as a science fiction writer. So, without further ado, here is my sci-fi writer’s manifesto.

1. Write only about what is real, or about what can reasonably be foreseen based on what is real.
2. Be honest about what is real and what is not real.
3. Do not write if you have nothing important to say.
4. Write in a clear, simple style, so as to be understood.
5. Look forward and outward from where we are to where we might one day be.

I think these five statements are all I need to write good science fiction that is worth writing. Soon I will write an exegisis to provide more detail about what each statement means to me.

(Note from the future: This was done and the links above will take you to each statement’s expansion.)