How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy Read Free

and Science Fiction (Fe&SF), will occasionally publish rustic fantasies, all the magazines prefer science fiction with rivets and plastic. And not because that is necessarily the editors’
    taste, but because that’s what the majority of the magazine-buying audience wants most and rewards best, with sales, with favorable letters of comment, and with Nebula and Hugo awards. The other two major magazines, Omni (which pays billions of dollars but buys only two stories an issue) and Analog, won’t even consider rustic fantasy, though Omni will occasionally buy a contemporary or urban fantasy-the kind of story where something magical is happening in a familiar high-tech environment.
    All these magazines pride themselves on publishing stories from new writers. What doesn’t get told quite as often is that they survive by discovering new writers. There’s a cycle in science fiction that most writers follow. They break into the field by selling short stories and novelettes to the magazines until their names and styles become familiar to book editors. Then they sign a few book contracts, get some novels under their belts, and suddenly they don’t have time for those $400 stories anymore. The magazines that nurtured them and gave them their starts watch as the novels flow and the short fiction trickles in. So the magazines are forced to search constantly for new talent.
    This is even more true with the newer and smaller markets. Aboriginal SF and Amazing Stories-the newest and oldest magazines in the field have much smaller impact on the field, in part because the strongest writers are generally selling to Omni, Asimov’s, and F&SF. But because of that, Abo and Amazing are that much more open to newcomers.
    In practical terms, you’ll have a better chance selling to the magazines if your story is (1) short and (2) science fiction rather than fantasy. My career followed that track; so did the careers of most other science fiction writers in the field. Only fantasy writers are virtually forced to begin selling at novel length because the market is so much smaller for fantasy.

    Boundary 2: A Community of Readers and Writers

    It’s important to remember that there was a time when every one of today’s publishing categories was part of the mainstream of fiction. When Gone with the Wind was published it was simply a novel, not a “historical” or a “romance”-though it would almost certainly be categorized that way today. And back when H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, A. Merritt, H. Rider Haggard, and others were inventing the genre of science fiction, their novels
    were published and displayed right alongside contemporaries like James, Dreiser, Woolf, and Conrad.
    Yet there was a clear difference even in the early 1900s between incipient science fiction, fantasy, and all the rest of literature. It was hard to put it into words then. H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and The Invisible Man were wildly different from each other, yet alike in the sense that they dealt with advances in science; hence he called these novels “scientific romances.”
    This surely made them similar to the works of Jules Verne, who also dealt with scientific advances in novels like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. But Verne never seemed to see danger or a dark side in advancing technology, and in the long run his novels were never so much about the science as about the sights and wonders to be found in strange, inaccessible places. Twenty Thousand Leagues wasn’t about Nemo’s submarine as much as it was about the marvelous sights to be seen from its portholes. Journey to the Center of the Earth was about survival in a strange, hostile environment, and included such delightful nonsense as the ruins of ancient Atlantis and dinosaurs that had survived deep in the bowels of the Earth.
    Wells was much more serious and logical than Verne in his extrapolation of the possible results of scientific advances. And yet their stories