How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy Read Free Page A

sometimes had quite similar structures. For instance, while Around the World in Eighty Days dealt entirely with the sights and wonders of Verne’s contemporary world, its ending absolutely hinges on knowledge of a scientific fact-that by traveling toward the east, the hero gained a day when he crossed the International Date Line. This is very much the same sort of structural game Wells played when he had the invaders from Mars in The War of the Worlds defeated by the common cold. Great events are changed by the most humble of facts-and yet when the reader reaches the surprise resolution, his faith in the order of the universe is restored. Humble little facts will save us in the end.
    A. Merritt’s Face in the Abyss and H. Rider Haggard’s She had even less in common with Wells than Verne did. Both these novels have a traveler find himself in a land long forgotten by modern man. In She, a magnificent woman has found a way to live forever, at the cost of the blood of her subjects; in The Face in the Abyss, lizard men descended from the dinosaurs keep a race of humans in thrall for their obscene sports and pleasures. There is more of magic than science in both of these books, yet
    There is a strong overlap of the readers who loved Wells, those who loved Verne, and those who loved Merritt and Haggard.
    Indeed, when Hugo Gernsback founded the first magazine devoted entirely to science fiction, Amazing Stories, back in the late twenties, he announced that he wanted to publish scientific romances like those of H.G. Wells; yet it is fair to say that, instead of the serious, rigorous scientific extrapolation found in Wells’s work, Gernsback’s magazine-and the others that soon imitated it-published stories that had far more of Verne’s love of machines or of Merritt’s and Haggard’s romps into strange and dangerous places than of Wells’s more serious treatment of science and the future. It wasn’t until the mid-thirties, when John W. Campbell became editor of Astounding (now Analog, that Wellsian science fiction came to the fore in the American magazines.
    Rigorous extrapolation, a gosh-wow love of gadgets, and mystical adventures in strange and mysterious places; every major stream in speculative fiction today can be traced back to authors who were writing before the publishing categories existed. From among the readers in the twenties and thirties who loved any or all of these authors arose the first generation of “science fiction writers,” who knew themselves to be continuing in a trail that had been blazed by giants. Gernsback’s publishing category of science fiction was a recognition of a community that already existed; once it was named, once it became self-conscious, that community blossomed and cast many seeds, giving rise to each new generation that repeats, revises, or reinvents the same literary tradition.
    The boundaries that once were fluid now are much more firm, because the publishing category reinforces the identity of the community of readers and writers. Hilton felt no qualms about writing a lost-land novel, Lost Horizon; it troubled no one that it didn’t belong in the same category as, say, his novel Good-bye, Mr. Chips. And so many readers responded to the book that the name of the lost land, Shangri-la, passed into the common language.
    Today, though, an author who wrote a fantasy like Lost Horizon would immediately be placed into the fantasy category, and if he then wrote a Good-bye, Mr. Chips, American publishers would be at a loss as to where to place it. How could you call it fantasy? Yet if you publish it out of the fantasy category, the readers who lilted the author’s earlier books won’t ever find it, and the readers who do browse the “Fiction” category won’t ever have heard of this author and will probably pass the novel by. As a
    result there will be enormous pressure on the author to write “more books like that Shangri-la book.”
    (Indeed, he will be pressed to write a