For many years, I resisted the urge to write science fiction. I've been a fantasy person for a really long time. While I took a sabbatical from it during my middle school days, I have been a fantasy reader for about as long as I can remember. Anne McCaffery's Dragonriders of Pern was a formative series: I started reading it in elementary school. An argument can be made that the Pern series is firmly science fiction/fantasy (genetically modified dragons on a planet colonized by interstellar human beings that fly around on teleporting, fire-breathing animals), much of the stories take place in the fantastical world of Pern, rather than the other quadrants of McCaffery's shared universe.
I'd even go so far as to say the first fantasy that I remember reading was The Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander, which I began with Mr. Soto in the 6th grade. I read all of those books (feeling as though Taran Wanderer was a bit unfocused and that The High King deserved its Newberry Medal) feverishly. I would submit that Brian Jacques' formulaic but fun Redwall series carries with it a fair helping of fantasy, if only because it's filled with talking animals, and I read at least a dozen of those books during my elementary and middle school years.
In a lot of ways, I simply lived in fantasy worlds. My tastes have remained fairly consistent, even meaning that the young adult book I wrote a couple years ago was focused on urban- and otherworldly fantasy, despite me doing a lot of research and work into the experiences of people of color to try to make my main character, a teenage black girl, feel more authentic.
I like dragons, I guess you could say.
So when I started out the Taralys series (which is the closest I've come to having a sequel to any of my books, lightly discussed here), I was distressed to realize that I would have to do something I had never done before: Write science fiction.
This shouldn't be too big of a deal, since science fiction is so broad, diverse*, and possibility-filled
that whatever I try to do, it should work. The problem is, I have a tendency to want to write things right. It's not full-blown researcher's (or, in my case, world builder's) disease, where the background work interferes with the real-life writing. But it is an issue when I am conceptualizing the story I'm trying to tell. I want the worlds to feel realized, vibrant, and full, and one of the ways of doing that is to give it a consistency and internal logic that fits together well.
With fantasy, I can tweak the magic systems as necessary. "Why do they need color to do their abilities?" I wave my hand: "Magic!" Easy. Things are different in this new world.
But with Conduits, I have to try to make something that looks right from our understanding of the world and bend it to the needs of the story. This isn't easy for me, and I'm pretty sure I didn't do it well. I ended up with a story that has some scientific ideas--hypotheses, really--and spun forward into a type of fictional science that really is the same as my hand-waving, "Magic!" response, save I'm talking about the "dual properties of light".
Well, that's okay. Provided the story is good, it shouldn't matter too much if I get wrong some details of quantum mechanics, right?
Right?
---
* We can pretend that the debacle that is the Hugos Awards doesn't reflect on science fiction as a whole, right?
I'd even go so far as to say the first fantasy that I remember reading was The Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander, which I began with Mr. Soto in the 6th grade. I read all of those books (feeling as though Taran Wanderer was a bit unfocused and that The High King deserved its Newberry Medal) feverishly. I would submit that Brian Jacques' formulaic but fun Redwall series carries with it a fair helping of fantasy, if only because it's filled with talking animals, and I read at least a dozen of those books during my elementary and middle school years.
In a lot of ways, I simply lived in fantasy worlds. My tastes have remained fairly consistent, even meaning that the young adult book I wrote a couple years ago was focused on urban- and otherworldly fantasy, despite me doing a lot of research and work into the experiences of people of color to try to make my main character, a teenage black girl, feel more authentic.
I like dragons, I guess you could say.
So when I started out the Taralys series (which is the closest I've come to having a sequel to any of my books, lightly discussed here), I was distressed to realize that I would have to do something I had never done before: Write science fiction.
This shouldn't be too big of a deal, since science fiction is so broad, diverse*, and possibility-filled
that whatever I try to do, it should work. The problem is, I have a tendency to want to write things right. It's not full-blown researcher's (or, in my case, world builder's) disease, where the background work interferes with the real-life writing. But it is an issue when I am conceptualizing the story I'm trying to tell. I want the worlds to feel realized, vibrant, and full, and one of the ways of doing that is to give it a consistency and internal logic that fits together well.
With fantasy, I can tweak the magic systems as necessary. "Why do they need color to do their abilities?" I wave my hand: "Magic!" Easy. Things are different in this new world.
But with Conduits, I have to try to make something that looks right from our understanding of the world and bend it to the needs of the story. This isn't easy for me, and I'm pretty sure I didn't do it well. I ended up with a story that has some scientific ideas--hypotheses, really--and spun forward into a type of fictional science that really is the same as my hand-waving, "Magic!" response, save I'm talking about the "dual properties of light".
Well, that's okay. Provided the story is good, it shouldn't matter too much if I get wrong some details of quantum mechanics, right?
Right?
---
* We can pretend that the debacle that is the Hugos Awards doesn't reflect on science fiction as a whole, right?
Comments
Now that I've complained, I will confess that I don't feel that way with every science fiction novel I've read. Some authors include their science explanations seamlessly with the plot. Others make me want to skip pages.