WORLD-BUILDING: CREATIVE INDULGENCE OR SFF NECESSITY?

I recently listened to a presentation about world-building in science fiction and fantasy by SFF author J.M. Frey (she has the best world-building tool/questionnaire I’ve ever seen. It fills me with equal parts admiration and shame!) It got me to noticing what a wide gap there is between hastily-written space operas or Tolkien wannabees and the great works from authors like Frank Herbert, Larry Niven and others. Obviously not all science fiction and fantasy is about describing a really alien culture—after all, a lot of SF especially is meant as allegory, holding our own society up to a mirror. When the Planet of the Apes movies explore the subject of racism, it wouldn’t serve that theme to make the ape society radically different from our own. But when fiction is meant to stretch our minds, it’s almost mandatory that the setting be full of novelty. Right?

How many high fantasy stories have you read whose characters wear armour, wield swords, and drink beer in roadside taverns? If it’s meant to be an alternate history or parallel Earth, OK. But a true fantasy world or alien planet? What if steel was never forged in that world? Most likely they wouldn’t use edged weapons because blades of rock and wood dull too quickly. Their armour would be more like thick padding to protect against hits from wooden staffs or hurled projectiles. Or maybe they use some kind of complex chemo-hormonal negotiation to solve conflicts instead of fighting! Without scythes they might never have harvested grain in quantities large enough to ferment into a drink. Heck, who says these people even developed a taste for fermented juices? What would their social structure look like then? What would replace the smoky tavern with grizzled patrons glaring suspiciously at every stranger who darkens the door? Something interesting, I’ll bet.

How many space stories have you read where the aliens use money, trade sex for favours or currency, eat together in social gatherings, and have elected councils or hereditary oligarchies for government? Religions, workforce structures, and family trees that are just off-kilter versions of our own with a made-up name? Yes, when your primary aim is to roll out an action plot or explore a significant moral issue, these things can be shortcuts that keep the tale from becoming too confusing or bloated, but do they create an immersive reading experience so compelling that it’s unforgettable?

My point is that, if you’re going to present a truly non-human society—alien or magical—it’s a cop-out to fill it with direct equivalents to the familiar elements of our world, even thinly-veiled ones. There must be lots of different ways a species can address the necessities of life other than the paths humans chose, and exploring those is challenging and fun for both author and reader.

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s The Mote In God’s Eye is still one of my favourite depictions of an authentically alien species, in fact the “Moties” include an impressive number of specialized subspecies, too. In Dragon’s Egg Robert L. Forward presents the Cheela, aliens that flow along the magnetic fields on the surface of a neutron star. The Oankali of Octavia E. Butler’s Lilith’s Brood trilogy stand out in my memory for their creatively-developed sexual and social relationships. But there are many great depictions of non-human cultures out there. Their alienness doesn’t keep us from relating to the characters, nor does it handicap the presentation of “universal” themes (by definition). What it does do is enrich the reading experience, and I expect it also goes a long way toward reducing our natural xenophobia—our resistance to the “other”. That’s not only a good thing if we ever are visited by aliens, but it could sure help our own world run a little smoother here and now!

If this sounds suspiciously like a lecture to my future self, you’re right. I’m always looking for ways to improve my writing, and this is one of them.

Obviously there’s a balancing act that has to be performed. If the reader has to expend too much mental energy trying to keep track of all of the different names, class structures, sexes, languages, forms of exchange etc., they may well give up on the exercise as not worth the effort. And if the invented threads of your tapestry aren’t logical and consistent, they’re distractions at the very least—at worst, they can cause the whole credibility of the story to unravel.

But let’s never forget that the stories we love have a rich heritage of broadening the mind. And there’s a reason we call SFF the literature of the imagination.

WEATHER WEIRD ENOUGH TO INSPIRE SCIENCE FICTION

Strange weather is happening all around us. Devastating heat waves and floods, soaring numbers of wildfires, rampaging storms of almost unprecedented frequency and ferocity—we’ve been warned about climate change for decades, yet many still refuse to believe that, a) it’s happening, b) we caused it, and c) it’s very unlikely that we can stop it. Most critically, some powerful world leaders are still trying to deny it (yes, I’m talking about you, Donald) and refuse to take the steps that might give us a fighting chance of at least reducing the disastrous effects still to come.

While some high-profile science fiction works have addressed the subject (including Kim Stanley Robinson’s Forty Signs of Rain and its two sequels, and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl) there’s not as much as I would have expected. Science fiction has a strong tradition of cautionary tales—spotting dangerous trends in society and extrapolating the potential pitfalls so as to warn our fellow humans which paths not to take. Climate change is not only a deadly precipice toward which we’re racing, but it’s brought about by things we’ve done and are still doing, and there are ways we might yet escape the worst of it if we take bold action in time. Plus, as with all things related to weather, it will affect every single human on the planet in a myriad of individual ways. In other words, it’s tailor-made for enough unique science fiction stories to fill a bookstore. I could argue that we might even have an obligation to write about it, because the alarm has been sounded and too many people just aren’t listening.

[Based on numerous interviews with climate scientists, David Wallace-Wells writes in New York magazine that the newest mass extinction event in Earth’s history has now begun and that we’re likely to become victims of it. Maybe it’s a worst-case scenario, but maybe not!]

Is it that we think the reading public has been oversaturated with climate news in mainstream media? Are we afraid to write about it because the potential effects are more suited to tales of the zombie apocalypse? Or is it because describing what we really see ahead on the road for humanity is simply too grim without enough real hope? After all, even disaster fiction (one of my favourite sub-genres) usually offers some form of happy ending, especially if brilliant scientists can come up with a last minute stroke of genius that saves the planet and everyone on it.

But climate change has been allowed to gain too much momentum for it to be solved by any single human solution, no matter how ingenious. So do we steer away from a subject that won’t give us that satisfying “quick fix”?

The top experts on climate change no longer talk about us preventing it—it’s already occurring, and while we must take drastic measures to reduce our carbon emissions, that will no longer be enough on its own to avoid disaster. We’re going to have to take proactive steps to remove carbon from the air and mitigate the warming of the atmosphere in other ways. Ideas being proposed already sound like science fiction (seeding the upper atmosphere with sulphur dioxide, or reflective particles to turn back sunlight. Giant sun shields in orbit.) So why not go all out and let our SF-trained imaginations run free? After all, it’s not only about trying to prevent further devastation, but how we’ll all cope with the unavoidable effects.

The potential plots are limitless: a family of refugees struggles to navigate the no-man’s-land between nations in a perpetual war over habitable land and water resources; a team of engineers races to create emergency colonies on the Moon or Mars in an attempt to save as many humans and other endangered species as possible; medical researchers frantically search for a cure for a deadly organism released by thawing permafrost (possibly even of alien origin); workers suddenly unemployed and destitute band together to build a new kind of nation from the ashes of the old. No matter what kind of book you like to write, you’ll find plenty of fodder in a world facing radical climate change.

Maybe the time has passed to write purely cautionary tales about it, but human beings facing  terrifying scenarios with gutsy sacrifices and ingenuity is the stuff of compelling fiction. And maybe there is hope. Especially if we can help by pointing the way to the light.