Writing popular fiction Read Free Page A

invasions of the Earth by wicked creatures, arch-fiends bent on the destruction of the race, super heroes—if you believe this is what science fiction is about, you either stopped reading it
circa
1930, or have formed your opinion from motion pictures and television programs. The science fiction stories of the 1930's and 1940's were often ludicrous, but they have long ago given way to the same sophistication of theme, background, characters, and style found in other genres. The film medium has rarely done justice to the field—notable exceptions being 2001: A
Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Village of the Damned
, and
THX-1138
. Before trying to write science fiction, read it (a truism applicable to
each
category of fiction, because each has its special requirements). When you read the work of Poul Anderson, John Brunner, Arthur Clarke, Harlan Ellison, Robert Heinlein, Barry Malzberg, Samuel R. Delany, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Silverberg, and Roger Zelazny, you'll discover that the rayguns have been packed in mothballs; the helpless maidens have taken to women's liberation; the heroes, once flawless, are now quite human.
    Of the five required elements of genre fiction, perhaps
background
is the most important in science fiction novels.
    Since most science fiction takes place in the future, the background must be wholly of the writer's imagination. The future can be researched to only a limited extent (even the most well-informed scientists can only
conjecture
what it will hold). The writer's vision must be detailed and believable, or the reader will ultimately not believe anything—not the characters, motivations, or the plot. This intense detailed creation is a challenge, but a fascinating one for the writer willing to invest more of his mind and soul than he would have to in the average Gothic or Western.

THE NEAR FUTURE
    Structuring a story background of the
near
future—twenty, thirty, or forty years from now—is in some ways more difficult than creating an entire alien planet in some impossibly distant future, because it cannot be made up
wholly
of the imagination. You must research to discover what engineers and scientists project for each area of living. From this data, you must then
extrapolate
a possible future, one which might logically rise out of the basis for the future which we are building today.
    This doesn't mean that every science fiction novel set thirty years from today must be placed against the same background. The future, even extrapolating it from today's conditions, may go a million different ways.
    For instance, a writer may set two different stories in the same future period, though he builds utterly different backgrounds for them. In
The Space Merchants
by Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, the authors project a future within this century, a society in which high-pressure advertising agencies have gained terrible influence over the minds of the masses and have become, in effect, rulers of the world. The same authors, in
Gladiators-at-Law
, intricately develop another near future in which big business has grown so large it's begun to collapse from within, society collapsing with it. Each future is believable; each could come to pass.
    The trick lies in how well you detail your future. If you paint it in broad strokes, no one will accept it, including an editor. When considering the background for any science fiction novel, be sure to give careful thought to each of the following:
    Moral codes of the future
. Assume that morality will change, and that it will change radically. Don't assume your own morality will inevitably dominate the future or that present-day morality will continue to be accepted. Remember that, in the early 1950s, no one would have believed that "free love" and "group marriage" would become commonplace two decades later. Though morality will most likely continue to be liberalized, even this is not a certainty. The future has infinite possibilities. All you can be