How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy Read Free Page B
Author: Orson Scott Card
Tags: Science-Fiction, Reference, Authorship, Language Arts & Disciplines, Writing Skills, Composition & Creative Writing, Creative Writing, Fantasy Literature
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whole series, which will be promoted as “The Shangri-la Trilogy” until a fourth book is published, then as “The Shangri-la Saga” until the author is dead. It happened to Frank Herbert with his Dune books, and despite her best efforts it is happening to Anne McCaffrey with her dragon books. Only a few, like Marion Zimmer Bradley, manage to break out of such channels and take a sizeable audience with them.
Yet my experience as a reader is that the category boundaries mean very little. There have been months, even years of my life when all I really wanted to read was science fiction; but I felt no shame or guilt, no enormous mental stretch when at other times I read historicals or mysteries, classics, poetry, or contemporary best sellers. At present my pleasure reading is history and biography, but that will certainly change again. And even at the height of a science fiction reading binge, nothing can stop me from devouring the latest John Hersey or William Goldman or Robert Parker novel.
The result is that today, while readers are very free, passing easily from one community to another, the publishing categories clamp down like a vise on the authors themselves. You must keep this in mind as you begin to publish. Do you wish to be forever known as a science fiction or fantasy writer?
Some writers whose careers have been largely based on science fiction writing have never been categorized that way. Kurt Vonnegut, for instance, stoutly resisted any claim that what he wrote was science fiction-though there is no definition of science fiction that does not include his novels within the genre except that the words science fiction have never been printed on his books.
John Hersey, as another example, has written such science fiction masterpieces as White Lotus, The Child Buyer, and My Petition for More Space; yet because he wrote other kinds of fiction first, he has never been locked into one category. (“Couldn’t you, like, put some aliens into this book, Mr. Hersey? I’m not sure your audience will know what to make of this historical set in China of all places.”)
Vonnegut and Hersey were never within the science fiction ghetto. A few rare writers like Bradbury and LeGuin have transcended the boundaries without compromising the elements of fantasy within their work.
But most of us find that the better we do as speculative fiction writers, the less interested publishers are in our non-sf, non-fantasy writing.
Boundary 3: What SF Writers Write Is SF
One surprising result of the ghettoizing of speculative fiction, however, is that writers have enormous freedom within its walls. It’s as if, having once confined us within our cage, the keepers of the zoo of literature don’t much care what we do as long as we stay behind bars.
What we’ve done is make the categories of science fiction and fantasy larger, freer, and more inclusive than any other genre of contemporary literature. We have room for everybody, and we are extraordinarily open to genuine experimentation.
Admittedly, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine regularly receives letters that ask, “In what sense is this story by Kim Stanley Robinson or Karen joy Fowler a science fiction or fantasy story? Why isn’t it appearing in Atlantic where it belongs?” Some readers complain; indeed, some fairly howl at what writers do under the rubric of sf and fantasy.
Yet the reason these stories don’t appear in Atlantic or Harper’s or The New Yorker is that even though they aren’t really science fiction or fantasy in the publishing-category sense or the community sense (there are neither rivets nor trees, neither science nor magic, and they certainly aren’t what readers were consciously looking for) their stories are nevertheless strange, in ways that editors outside the field of sf and fantasy find quite threatening.
There is no particular reason why Karen joy Fowler’s “Tonto at 40” (published as “The Faithful Companion at 40” to avoid
Yet my experience as a reader is that the category boundaries mean very little. There have been months, even years of my life when all I really wanted to read was science fiction; but I felt no shame or guilt, no enormous mental stretch when at other times I read historicals or mysteries, classics, poetry, or contemporary best sellers. At present my pleasure reading is history and biography, but that will certainly change again. And even at the height of a science fiction reading binge, nothing can stop me from devouring the latest John Hersey or William Goldman or Robert Parker novel.
The result is that today, while readers are very free, passing easily from one community to another, the publishing categories clamp down like a vise on the authors themselves. You must keep this in mind as you begin to publish. Do you wish to be forever known as a science fiction or fantasy writer?
Some writers whose careers have been largely based on science fiction writing have never been categorized that way. Kurt Vonnegut, for instance, stoutly resisted any claim that what he wrote was science fiction-though there is no definition of science fiction that does not include his novels within the genre except that the words science fiction have never been printed on his books.
John Hersey, as another example, has written such science fiction masterpieces as White Lotus, The Child Buyer, and My Petition for More Space; yet because he wrote other kinds of fiction first, he has never been locked into one category. (“Couldn’t you, like, put some aliens into this book, Mr. Hersey? I’m not sure your audience will know what to make of this historical set in China of all places.”)
Vonnegut and Hersey were never within the science fiction ghetto. A few rare writers like Bradbury and LeGuin have transcended the boundaries without compromising the elements of fantasy within their work.
But most of us find that the better we do as speculative fiction writers, the less interested publishers are in our non-sf, non-fantasy writing.
Boundary 3: What SF Writers Write Is SF
One surprising result of the ghettoizing of speculative fiction, however, is that writers have enormous freedom within its walls. It’s as if, having once confined us within our cage, the keepers of the zoo of literature don’t much care what we do as long as we stay behind bars.
What we’ve done is make the categories of science fiction and fantasy larger, freer, and more inclusive than any other genre of contemporary literature. We have room for everybody, and we are extraordinarily open to genuine experimentation.
Admittedly, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine regularly receives letters that ask, “In what sense is this story by Kim Stanley Robinson or Karen joy Fowler a science fiction or fantasy story? Why isn’t it appearing in Atlantic where it belongs?” Some readers complain; indeed, some fairly howl at what writers do under the rubric of sf and fantasy.
Yet the reason these stories don’t appear in Atlantic or Harper’s or The New Yorker is that even though they aren’t really science fiction or fantasy in the publishing-category sense or the community sense (there are neither rivets nor trees, neither science nor magic, and they certainly aren’t what readers were consciously looking for) their stories are nevertheless strange, in ways that editors outside the field of sf and fantasy find quite threatening.
There is no particular reason why Karen joy Fowler’s “Tonto at 40” (published as “The Faithful Companion at 40” to avoid