Your Guide to a Successful Writing Career
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by Paula Fleming
Says the author, "I want the whole book to have a sense of the fantastic and the mysterious--that's what I love about fantasy. Where I get hung up is when I bring her into our world, where I could actually tie in ecological science and give the earthbeat a real, definible face. Possibly avoid having the book written off as New Age woo-woo, etc., written by someone who was too lazy to do research. But the two tones don't seem to meld." Is this novel doomed, or can magic and science appear in the same work and both carry credibility? Yes, they can, but the author has to come to some personal judgements on philosophical matters.
Anne McCaffrey's Dragons of Pern series blends SF and F tropes: humans settle another planet and selectively breed or genetically engineer the local fauna; then their descendants live in a quasi-medieval society with keeps, guilds, serfs, a warrior class, and telepathic dragons. China Miéville's Perdido Street Station made the final ballot for the 2001 World Fantasy Award. It includes magic, or at least biological or physical phenomena that appear magical to those who don't understand them. All sorts of funky critters run around in the book's universe, from mantis people to alternative-universe-netherworld giant spiders. Yet the protagonist is a scientist -- working with late-1800s technology, but nonetheless a scientist on the cutting edge of his world's understanding. Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, which is about as hard as SF gets, contains chapters from the point of view of "the little red people" who live in dust piles and try to talk to the big people who've come to their planet. It also tells tales of "Big Man," a folkloric character akin to Paul Bunyon and Pecos Bill. On Babylon 5, we met the Technomages, people who developed technology to a high level and modeled it on illusion and other magical forms. And, of course, the X-Files frequently juxtaposed magical and scientific phenomena and thinking, often putting them into direct conflict with each other.
As with any other unconventional approach to writing genre, we need to ask ourselves why we're doing this. Most genre stories fall neatly into the science fiction or fantasy categories. Are we combining the two because we think the technique is complicated and tricky and will impress the reader? Are we just not adept enough at our craft to carry the story through a scientific universe or a magical universe? Those aren't good reasons. So why might a story combine fantasy and science fiction elements? Take a moment now and try answering the following questions:
After giving these questions some thought, we should know whether we need to put both magical and scientific elements in our story for it to work. We should have a pretty good idea, too, what we want to do with the elements. So now let's think about how we'll work with them.
Tone We often use lush prose to describe magical worlds, to convey a sense of the arcane or the possibility thereof. Also, we may want to convey a heightened sense of aesthetics -- a majestic dragon, an imperious queen, a shimmering pendant, and so forth. In a story about physical or social science, on the other hand, we often use more precise, terse prose to convey a sense of practicality, to make our extrapolations feel possible. Here are some ways to unify
the tone of your story:
Systems If someone practices the scientific method, they do so because they believe it works. Likewise if someone practices magic. Whatever your personal beliefs about science and magic, your characters must have believable reasons to do what they do. For example, our shaman may smoke an herb to hear the earthbeat, because what she hears under the influence usually corresponds to the tribe's subsequent success at getting food. Dr. Dana Scully persists in performing autopsies because the cause of death she discovers usually corresponds to other facts in the case. If either the magic or the science is noticeably weaker than the other, then the story will not hang together as a whole. Here are some points to consider:
Theme Ideally, stories should try to tell us something we don't already know. Especially when we combine genre tropes in an unusual way, we should do so to explore thematic material not accessible only through science fiction elements or fantasy elements. We've already thought about some of the questions our work might address. Now let's consider some plot techniques that could help us address them:
With a clear idea of why you're blending magic and science, you can use unities of tone, system, and theme to concoct a very successful and delicious story, one that challenges our preconceptions of how the world works in genre stories. This article may not be reprinted without the author's written permission. Paula L. Fleming's science fiction and fantasy have appeared in a variety of publications, including gothic.net, Tales of the Unanticipated, Meisha Merlin's Such a Pretty Face anthology, and Lone Wolf Publishing's Extremes 3: Terror on the High Seas anthology. By day, she's a human resources generalist at the Wedge Community Co-op. To help her, she has three big dogs, two cats, and one husband. |
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