Science Fiction & Fantasy

The Han Solo Rule of Technology

Author: August 1, 2017 0 Comments

Research continues to be the great bugbear of many writers’ lives. Writers in general trend to suffer from pretty severe Impostor Syndrome because we just sit around making shit up instead of doing literally anything else, and so there’s a certain sense that we have to become literal experts in anything we write about, so we can take on all comers when someone complains about the way we imagine space travel in our interstellar ice pirate epic.

This is tosh, of course. When writing sci-fi and dealing with speculative technology or science—even stuff based on real-world science—the key is similar to lying. As long as you believe it, you’re golden. In other words, look to Han Solo in Star Wars and worry less about scientific accuracy and more about sounding like it all makes sense.

The Spaces Between

In the original Star Wars, if you recall, Han Solo brags that his ship the Millennium Falcon is the ship that did the “Kessel Run” in 12 parsecs. The Kessel Run is a great example of a Noodle Incident—a cool-sounding feat that is never actually explained. Why is the Kessel Run famous? Why is speed important? You can imagine answers to those questions, but you don’t have them.

Now, saying you did the Kessel Run in 12 Parsecs sounds pretty cool and impressive, especially when delivered with Harrison Ford’s trademark sarcastic charm. But it’s meaningless. A Parsec is a measurement of distance, not time, and it isn’t even very commonly used. So Han Solo dropped some grade-A gibberish on us.

(Note: Some super fans have twisted themselves into knots trying to argue that it actually does make sense, but these arguments are by and large kind of dumb.)

So, the lesson here is simple: Don’t sweat the science. Take a page from George Costanza from Seinfeld, who once famously advised that something is not a lie if you believe it to be true. Your science doesn’t have to make sense. It just has to sound good. Making it sound good is the challenge, here.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go tend to my quantum particle fields.

General, Science Fiction & Fantasy, worldbuilding, Writing

Worldbuilding: Fake It Til You Make It

Author: April 22, 2017 0 Comments

World-building is one of the fun parts of writing, at least usually. World-building is entering a world of pure imagination and just going ham on it, inventing everything from the shoe sizing system to the weather. For me, it often involves drawing maps and writing history essays and the like, and like a lot of writers I can spend a lot of time building that world without actually writing anything that even slightly resembles a novel.

Sometimes, though, I get much more excited about the story idea itself, or the character that has popped into my head, and I want to start writing immediately. I don’t want to figure out the propulsion system of the starships, or the precise magic system, or the climate. I just want to tell the story that’s roaring between my ears, and world-building will just slow everything down.

So I skip it.

Universal Pantsing

World-building always seems like it has to be Step One of the thirty-three billion required to write a novel (Step 16,567: Sacrifice goat by moonlight; Step 234,667,557: delete all instances of the word “that”; Step 1,334,556,735: Spellcheck), but it doesn’t have to be. All you need, really, is a vague sense of what your universe will be like. Sci-fi, reality, or fantasy? Broad strokes of the characters’ daily experience? Inciting incident for the bit you’re working on right now? That’s it, that’s all you need. You can fake your world-building for a very long time with these basic, primal pieces of your universe.

In the mean-time, you’re writing, you’re creating characters, and you’re getting your inspiration down. It’s a lot of fun to let everyone talk mysteriously about details you haven’t quite thought of yet, and this sort of work also fills in your world-building subconsciously, I think.

So, if you’ve got a great idea or a great character but you haven’t created the universe yet, you can certainly spend a few weeks or months doing the heavy lifting—or you can fake it for a while, and see what happens. Both approaches work for me. Then again, so does day drinking and waking up to discover I somehow wrote 3,000 words of history for my book.

Novels, Science Fiction & Fantasy

Fiction Science is Not Magic. Unless It *Is* Magic

Author: April 15, 2017 0 Comments

I see my brother regularly; let’s call him Yan.

Yan is a famous curmudgeon, dissatisfied with just about every movies, TV show, or book he’s ever digested, and we often have long talks about what he doesn’t like about The Entertainments the universe offers him. He’s usually pretty savvy in his criticisms, though I’m more forgiving and can accept imperfection as long as there are compensating pleasures offered and so we don’t usually agree on what qualifies as ‘good’ in TV or movies.

One of the things we often discuss is a tendency by bad writers to view any Science Fiction or Fantasy story as a license to do anything, to toss out the very laws of physics. I’m not talking about magic here, you see – I’m talking about the assumption by hack writers that just because a story is SFnal, anything can happen. It’s one thing to have magic in your story. The Jedi can do just about anything, okay, fine – that gets established early on in the Star Wars world and so when Yoda lifts the X-Wing out of the swamp, or when Vader chokes the life out of someone who’s on a completely different ship, well, you just shrug and accept it. The rules of The Force are established and that’s fine.

Sometimes, though, you have writers who decide that just because you have, say, a psychic or a spaceship in the story, well, anything is possible. That if a character has one special power or ability, he or she should be able to sprout new ones whenever the plot requires a solution. Of course, sometimes a character with unspecified abilities can believably display a heretofore unknown aspect of them – take Spock stuffing his soul into Bones McCoy in Star Trek 2 – so to a certain extent it depends on how it’s handled.

For the clearest example of the acidic effect this attitude has on SF writing, I direct your suffering eyes to Highlander 2: The Quickening. The special sauce of this movie is the idea that since it’s a SF story, anything goes! And I do mean anything. Though to be fair this movie apparently suffered from meddlesome investors who took a bad movie and made it indescribably terrible, the fact remains that the writers of this movie heard ‘immortals’ and ‘science fiction’ and decided that whatever batshit crazy stuff they came up with would work.

You can, of course, let your imagination run when writing SF/F work, but there have to be rules of some sort. Especially in serial works when a character has, say, dozens of episodes or novels to develop and display their abilities. Suddenly granting them the one power which would solve your plotting problems will not fly, my friend. But then, my brother and I are bitter, bitter people. For example: I still intend to get my $7 back from the producers of Highlander 2. Oh, some day, they will pay me back. I swears it.

Science Fiction & Fantasy