Writing Science Fiction and Fanatsy

Is anyone writing a science fiction or fantasy book, or know of prospective authors I can speak with? It would be nice to exchange thoughts and ideas.

https://www.librarything.com/groups/hobnobwithauthors

Group called “Hobnob with authors”

I would be delighted to talk about writing speculative fiction.

Although I'm not entirely sure that the other members of the group would welcome us discussing writing here.

But fear not. If they don't like the idea, I know some places we can move the discussion to. :)

Is there any particular aspect of writing science fiction you are particularly interested in getting thoughts and ideas on?

Crossposted.

>2 DugsBooks:
Although as the Hobnob group's elected "creator" I am naturally inclined to favor moving discussion to that group...

...the OP did specify "prospective writers", and thus might feel more comfortable hanging out in the Writer-readers group.

(Personally, the reason I want to "Hobnob with Authors" is so that I can discuss the writing process, so I really don't care if someone is only a "prospective author", or has sold thousands of books. All I care about is whether or not they are genuinely there to talk.)

>4 LShelby: Yeah, ever since the bottom fell out of the teenage vampire/werewolf conflicts with trans shapeshifters market I have given up on the writing thing . ;-)

I thought the above might find company in your area, although anyone post away where ever. I am not steering anyone away, just to a place.

>5 DugsBooks: "Yeah, ever since the bottom fell out of the teenage vampire/werewolf conflicts with trans shapeshifters market I have given up on the writing thing"

Tragic. Another great loss to literature due to the vagaries of the market.

But my daughter recently reported to me (with great glee) that during the latest revision her WIP had not only acquired an actual motive for the murder mystery part, (a very good thing to have, I'm sure everyone will agree) it had also acquired a vampire ice dragon.

So you can feel comforted to know that someone out there somewhere still continues to carry the torch. ;)

Thank you. I will move my discussions to Hobnob with Authors

>6 LShelby: "it had also acquired a vampire ice dragon. "

It lives off icebergs? Raids the freezer compartments in restaurants? Hunts down yeti?

So many possibilities.

>8 reading_fox:
One of those phrases that just sort of triggers the imagination. :)

But I think we're getting more than a little off-topic here.

...Unless the vampire ice dragons are an alien species.

I admit that there are advantages in cold climates to having a large mass, it helps retain body heat, but how would a creature of any size manage to subsist off of blood alone? And would a 'dragon' be warm-blooded?

Maybe it's aquatic?

Hi, I recently finished writing a Science Fiction book. Hydra is available through Amazon. I currently write as a hobby, but if this book sells, it could lead to more then a hobby. I am working on a second book which should be available later. Any ideas anyone has or if anyone does reviews please let me know. I always welcome comments.

Thanks.

>10 alanlong:
For reviews, once again, you can try the Hobnob With Authors Group. Every once in a while there is someone who goes there looking for stuff to review. Just make sure you post to a promotion thread, or they won't be able to find you, later.

For ideas on getting the book to sell... the most recent post I've seen on that topic was in the Writers-readers group.
https://www.librarything.com/topic/316002

My science fiction writing hearkens back to the early days of sci-fi writers when imagination trumped technological knowledge. I am more concerned with the the ideas than the total accuracy. There has to be some suspension of disbelief to let your mind go with the flow the author is creating.

>12 LeonStevens:
That makes it sound like in the early days the information was there to be had, and everyone just ignored it for the sake of a good story.

Is that really how it was?

...I'm not convinced that people writing about travel between stars today are being any less imaginative than Verne was when he wrote about travelling beneath an ocean over a hundred years ago.

I agree with LShelby. There's some startlingly "hard" older SF that really cleaves to known (or inferrable) science, while extrapolating technologies. And most current SF doesn't lack for imagination in my experience. There now seems to be less FTL travel accomplished via rhetorical hand-waving, which is just fine, I think.

I'm actually a fan of sword-and-planet (a.k.a. planetary romance), which is definitely an urtype of "science fantasy" that doesn't dwell on "total accuracy" in scientific representation. (I'm talking about the Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs or Lee Brackett, for example, along with more recent successors and their favored planets.) But that stuff really leverages a lot of tropes and conventions to the point where I think meticulously scientific writing like you might get from, say, Kim Stanley Robinson shows far more genuine imagination.

One of the things that makes Dune so attractive is the fusion of some of those planetary romance tropes with an attention to scientific concepts like ecology (and a grittier sense of political intrigue).

>14 paradoxosalpha:
I love the ecology, but I'm not sure I'm all that attracted by the uber-gritty political intrigue.

...
I confess that as far as space travel goes I'm mostly just interested in getting people to some other world, so that I will have an excuse to build another world. But why handwave when there's such a large repertoire of theoretical physics to draw on? It's often easier to come up with something interesting when you have some weird rule or limitation to follow. It prevents you from just going with whatever your personal default is. And even if its a rule that other authors have followed before, when it meshes with your personal interests and attitude, it will probably feel like something new.

(At least that's what my musical theory book gave as the explanation for some of its odder composition exercises.)

>13 LShelby: "Is that really how it was?"

I think that the writers at the time used the knowledge that they had. Because there were many unknowns, they could just "make it up" and we as readers would accept it. As technology advanced, it gave more credibility, but also allowed people to nit-pick if something wasn't right.

Example: (I don't know if this is completely true...) Niven's ringworld, in it's first incarnation, was proven to be unstable, so he re-jigged it in newer additions. Now for me, when I read it, I didn't feel the need to scrutinize the physics of how it stayed in orbit, it was just very cool idea.

Maybe if he had had trained "space bats" making it spin, I would have enjoyed it less...

For futuristic works, I tend to assume that technology and science have advanced to the point that something can be done unless its super gratuitously stupid.

After all, my mother learned in her high school physics class all about why a human being couldn't survive going faster than the speed of sound.

But I do enjoy a plausible explanation for how it's achieved. And unexplained natural phenomenon are a riskier enterprise than technologies. Ringworld didn't bother me, either. But the book with the mysterious killer 'tides' lurking in deep waters bothered me a whole lot.

Speaking of tides, I actually have an example of how learning something new ruined something I had myself written earlier. I used to think that having multiple moons would make really crazy tidal patterns. (I'm not sure how I got this idea, but it was probably from reading early science fiction.) And while I was a teen I wrote some song lyrics about crazy tides for one of my stories, since it was set on a world with three moons.

Later in life I was building a world with four moons, and this time I did the math...
...and the math said the tides weren't a big deal after all.

And I said, 'Darnit, that song I wrote!'

>17 LShelby: "unless its super gratuitously stupid."

I agree. For me, if I read about those crazy tides, I wouldn't do the math, I would enjoy the story because it sounds plausible.

Nitpicking takes the enjoyment out of things...

>17 LShelby: Which reminds me of a geography essay i wrote in school at age 17 or so.

The assignment was "Using what you know about weather systems, wind and pressure belts, prove that the Earth is not flat." Well, I could see that was just dressing up the subject "Regurgitate what you know about wind and pressure belts" and that didn't seem very taxing to me. So I turned the assignment on its head and said "What if the Earth were flat? What sort of weather would we observe?"

I then defined my cosmology: i assumed a circular orbit of the Sun (which I now know from Kepler that it would not have been; fortunately, I doubt that my geography teacher knew Kepler's work either). In this system, the edges of the Earth nearest the Sun's orbit would have gotten a bit crispy round the edges, but never mind. I also didn't attempt to explain seasons.

I then suggested that the Earth would receive the heating effect of the Sun proportionate to its point in its orbit; and putting it simply, I said that we would most likely see convectional rainfall that you could set your watch by. But we don't see that, so therefore the Earth is not flat.

My hypothesis must've been reasonably sound (as long as you didn't pick at it too much) because i recollect that I got something like a 75% mark for originality. i didn't prove the Earth was round, either, but then again I didn't see how that connected with the original question anyway.

I never became a geographer, though.

>18 LeonStevens: "Nitpicking takes the enjoyment out of things..."

Yeah, stopping in the middle of a story to do math isn't the best way to maintain story momentum and stuff.

>19 RobertDay:
The way you did the assignment sounds much more fun.

Assuming the world is rotating like a coin spinning, rather than like a top, seasons should work roughly the same, shouldn't they? The amount of tilt in the spin controls the angle of the sun as it hits the surface.

If it spins like a top and only has mild tilt, then the sun should barely creep over the horizon for half a year (that's your summer) and be just under the horizon for the other half a year (that's your winter). Summer is day and winter is night.
...No worries about getting sunburn while skiing from snow-glare on that world.

>20 LShelby: My flat Earth wasn't spinning; your world may differ. :-) (though don't you think we'd have noticed the Coriolis forces by now?)

>21 RobertDay:
Er... but we DO have Coriolis forces.

On a flat world that spins they would only go in one direction, unlike on a spherical world that spins, where they go in opposite directions based on hemisphere.

I actually have a flat world that doesn't spin, it tilts back and forth like a teeter-totter instead. But it's a fantasy world. My science fictional worlds all do the crazy planet full of crazy people summersaulting all around the sky* thingy.

Now for the spinning like a top world, the centrifugal forces are an interesting consideration, but if the effect of gravity can more than cancel out the centrifugal force on a rotating spherical planet, I don't know why it wouldn't also be possible to have gravity overcome centrifugal force on a rotating disk of similar mass.

*It's a Rogers and Hammerstein song reference. Kudos to anyone who recognizes it. :)

RobertDay & LShelby

I have loved your discussion. It reminded me of those simple days when the difference between Hard SF and Soft SF was defined by reference to Verne and Wells. Verne's SF tried to stick to known Scientific laws*. Wells, on the other hand, made shit up. If he wanted time-travel, he had time travel.

*Except for the little error he made in From Earth to the Moon which, by spotting something funny and checking the Physics formulae, I spotted and mistakenly put it down to what must have been the state of knowledge at the time. (Do not ask me to remember the exact mistake or to go back and read the book again to work it out.) A French author at WorldCon in 2005 informed everyone attending a panel on Verne and Wells, that Verne earned his hatred, and the hatred of other French school children, because in school he and others were given the task of spotting Verne's error in the book.

>23 pgmcc: "Wells, on the other hand, made shit up. If he wanted time-travel, he had time travel."

Yay!!!!!

>23 pgmcc:
Poor Verne, and poor school-children.
...It is sometimes safer to be a bit more vague?

But the current 'what we know' does actually seem to suggest that time travel ought to be possible, we just don't know to achieve it. :)

>24 LeonStevens:
Er, actually I think maybe I find Verne slightly more fun than Wells? Not that I've read that much Wells. But the fact that I didn't run out and look for more after reading the Time Machine says something, doesn't it? I've read a whole lot more Verne. I'm not sure all of it counts as science fiction, but it all has that 'let's have an adventure while exploring the possibilities' feel to it. Wells felt more like 'I will now use the device of a time machine in order to expound on what I think is wrong with humanity.'

The point is that how hard the science is seems to me to be irrelevant in regards to how fun the story is.

When writers ignore science in order to build some completely impossible dystopia so that they can explore a mind experiment that I don't really see the point of, I will likely find that much less fun than an adventure story in which most of the trials come about through completely technically plausible mechanical failures.

On the other paw, I will forgive waaayyy more errors, omissions and other problems in any book, if I am otherwise having a lot of fun.

...
On the flat world that spins like a top, the Coriolis effect would cause circular currents in the polar oceans and the atmosphere that would intensify as you moved toward the pole. So sailing further from the shore might speed your journey, but it also would make it way more dangerous. Whatever you do, don't get sucked into the maelstrom in the middle. It ought to be of pretty terrifying intensity.

Wasn't there a famous hard sf story about a disk shaped world? I seem to recall bumping into a reference and thinking it sounded interesting, but never actually finding a copy.

...

>25 LShelby: I think it's one of Hal Clement's works, possibly one of the Mesklinite series. It's been years since I read it though.

https://www.librarything.com/series/Mesklinite

>25 LShelby: Yes, there is always a limit to believably...

Decades ago, I definitely preferred Wells to Verne. With Verne, the translation matters a lot. The ones I grew up with, that you find in the public domain books, turn out to be awful.. I read a better version of Journey to the Center of the Earth a year or so ago. I should do a Wells re-read.

>15 LShelby: Hi! I do understand the need to get to another world so you have a fresh pallet to work from. I however took a different route by developing a community and culture by wiping out the old earth world and making people afraid of technology and going back to feudal times. It was a fun writing experience and I have completed 4 novels (only published one so far) in my fifth novel there is a small return to a tech world but it still allows me to make my own rules and develop my people and the conflict. So you do not have to planet jump to create a good science fiction read. Sue

>30 SueHerbine: "So you do not have to planet jump to create a good science fiction read."

Demonstrably true. There is a lot of good Science Fiction set in the near future of this world, and a lot of good post-apocalyptic sf also. Furthermore, steampunk was supposed to be a science fiction sub-genre originally, (although all the ones I've read recently had science so soft as to be completely mushy).

But when I referred to building worlds... I really do enjoy building the whole world sometimes. I don't want my fiction to be constrained by the physical confines of this planet. When I first encountered the John Carter of Mars books, one of the cool speculative aspects of them was the difference caused by the change in gravity.

>27 Maddz:

Mission of Gravity, the first Mesklinite book, features a huge planet that’s discoidal due to spinning very rapidly.

It’s one of those books where the setting is a lot more interesting than the plot.

I write both. My debut novel is "science fantasy." I'm also in the middle of writing a guidebook to its universe.

Seems like odd-shaped planets would be interesting to explore in science fiction when you're actually trying to explore and bring attention to the scientific elements that would come into play (ala Meskline), but in fantasy would only prove a distraction unless you really don't care about the science and make that clear, (ala Pratchett's Discworld.) Or you're going for science fiction disguised as fantasy, but then you'd best be warning the reader somehow (ala McCaffrey.)

>34 Cecrow:
Wouldn't McCaffrey be Fantasy disguised as Science Fiction?

In fantasy, I say "This world is flat, and these are the specific magical effects that were used to make it seem normal". In my personal notes on the history of that world I have "Inhabitants discover that gravity appears to be mostly magical in nature, and figure out how to locally turn it off, leading to the creation of flying cities."

In science fiction, I say, "This world is flat, and that's why the horizon looks strange, particularly once you go up into the sky, and the gravity is different depending on where you are, and and the terrain feels like it's on a slope, and the world's only ocean is directly in the middle with land all around the edge."

But in neither case is the world's strange shape what the story is about.

I don't think I want to write books where the setting is more interesting than the plot.

>35 LShelby:

I could see either characterization regarding McCaffery. Her best-known works are the Pern books, where the emphasis on dragons and feudal-style low-tech society (especially in the Harper Hall juveniles) hugely obscures the fact that Pern is an exoplanet where humans are cut off from their terrestrial origins.

Her oeuvre as a whole is characterized by SF with strong fantasy-style heroism and romance tropes, where a critic might legitimately claim that the books are "really" fantasy.

>36 paradoxosalpha:
This is an old argument that I don't actually have strong feelings about, so I can argue either side, but probably shouldn't.

The dividing line between Fantasy and SF can get pretty darn hazy. :)

As a writer I used to say, "This is SF, so the rules I invent for it should probably be extrapolated from theoretical physics" and "This is fantasy so the rules just have to be consistent" At the time, I thought that I had a good grip on what the difference is at least to me. But then I created a world where there were no new rules, and stumped myself. ::rueful::

>37 LShelby: A lot of readers decide things based on aesthetics, so I don't get too technical with it. In the context of aesthetic, there is only one simple, childish but accurate difference between fantasy and sci-fi, and it's essentially the same as religion vs. atheism: magic vs. science. Which is more your thing? The challenge is building on the aesthetics without getting too tropy.

>38 MythButton: "magic vs. science. Which is more your thing?"

I must be agnostic. I don't seem to have a preference.

But I think as you read more widely you will find works that your childish method of differentiation leaves wandering about loose with nowhere to go.

Have you read Anne McCaffrey's Pern stories? We start out the first book (as written, not chronologically), with a heroine in a medieval-esque setting, who can do some kind of magic. She is trying to get the attention of some dragon riders. The aesthetic is clearly fantasy... until we realize that we are supposedly on a different planet which was settled by humans long ago but they lost most of their technology. And the magic is really psionics and psionics are science... right?

Many of Anne McCaffrey's space based stories feature psionic powers that have no scientific basis whatsoever, but which are claiming to none-the-less be science. These sorts of books often get classed as "science fantasy". Science Fiction without science. (I consider much of the current crop of steampunk to belong in this group.)

An example of another, different kind of edge case is Westmark by Lloyd Alexander. It takes place on an imaginary world, and the aesthetic is just like a "typical" fantasy novel... except for one significant issue: there isn't any magic. In spite of that lack, one of the three things it is most commonly tagged as is "Fantasy" (the other two are "Young Adult"/"YA" and "Adventure".) Fantasy without magic.

The world of mine that I was referring to above is a "Westmark" type of world. It is a world that doesn't actually exist, but there is no magic there. The first story I completed in this world was dieselpunk without the punk, and the story I have been working on most recently is a wuxia without the kung-fu. :)

Most novels with 'magic' in them posits an underlying 'science' that makes them work. There is a set of quantifying rules that underlie the use and practise of the magic. So to me most could be classed as SF and not Fantasy, assuming the latter has a magical element in them.

When the magic seems to follow no rules and is more wish-fulfilment, that is Fantasy.

>40 UncleMort: If the magic does not follow rules, that bad fantasy and really bad writing.

Every competent fantasy novel, let alone a good one, will have the magic in them follow internal rules and not be "it can do anything I need at the moment for the plot to work". Just saying.

>41 AnnieMod: Then perhaps competent Fantasy should be grouped with Science Fiction under a more inclusive title of SF ~ as in Speculative Fiction. Certainly booksellers seem to always group them together.

By the way, "it can do anything I need at the moment for the plot to work" also appears in Science Fiction. It's termed 'Handwavium'

>42 UncleMort: And it is a sign of bad writing - just like it is when it is used in fantasy :)

>41 AnnieMod: My least favorite kind of fantasy, the one where there is no magic system. Ugh. The same with scifi that just imagines you can do 'stuff' without even attempting a theoretical framework.

>42 UncleMort: Speculative fiction is something else entirely. That's futuristic fiction with an emphasis on society, not the tech.

>44 Karlstar: Yep - if there is no system and no rules in the magic system/science system, it is a free for all. Even the witches in fairy tales have constraints and a limit to their abilities... ;)

PS: Speculative fiction is also used as an umbrella term for all the non-realistic genres (from science fiction to fantasy and horror and anything in between and around them, including the ones hiding in the corner and pretending to be literature and not to be part of it ;) ) Which is what was meant above I think. I gave up really trying to put things into neat boxes awhile back - some books can fit in boxes, some just can't.

>45 AnnieMod: John Clute coined the word 'fantastika' for this purpose.

>46 RobertDay: Coined? More like lifted it directly from some Eastern European languages including the one I grew up in ;)

But then that's how English had always acquired its vocabulary anyway :)

The double meaning of "speculative fiction" is annoying but I don't think we're getting rid of it anytime soon.

I tend to think the best fantay is where the author succeeds in convincing you there's an internal logic and coherence to how magic works but perserves mystique by not actually telling you the details.

>47 AnnieMod: Yup.

"A convenient shorthand term employed and promoted by John Clute since 2007 to describe the armamentarium of the fantastic in literature as a whole, encompassing science fiction, Fantasy, fantastic horror and their various subgenres (see also Gothic SF; Horror in SF; SF Megatext), but not Proto SF. It is a concept normally restricted to narratives. More generally understood, the term has long been used in Czech, other Eastern European and Russian discussions of genre; it is the title of Bulgaria's first sf magazine (formerly known as F.E.P.) and, as Fantastyka (which see), of Poland's."

https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/fantastika (Clute's the principal author of the article)

>48 AndreasJ: "I tend to think the best fantay is where the author succeeds in convincing you there's an internal logic and coherence to how magic works but perserves mystique by not actually telling you the details."

I enjoy learning the rules, myself. I think maybe I admire "clever" more than I admire "mystique".

Just finished a re-read of an old classic The Warlock in Spite of Himself. An agent from a highly technological society lands on a 'lost colony' where magic works.
The explanation for the magic holds together well and the locals think our protagonist is a warlock because of his use of high tech.

Only one bit of 'magic' jars with me. Its where one of the witches can take the form of other creatures such as a bird, a mouse and even, in one instance, a spider. I have trouble with shape-shifters, it's not that the change takes place, but where does the mass go?

>51 UncleMort: So this is a question I have often asked myself too: where does the mass go when shapeshifters become something small?

Spitballing here… maybe they are able to bank the extra mass in a parallel universe? Or maybe the excess mass is deposited as nearby earth (i.e., soil)? I’d be interested in others’ hypotheses. 😀

Even a change in volume is sort of troubling: the instantaneous vacuum would at least make a bang as the neighboring atmosphere filled it, right?

>53 paradoxosalpha: …not to mention what happens to the change in their pocket.

>54 pgmcc: 😅

>51 UncleMort: And that's why most Hard Science Fiction readers hate Fantasy. There's a lot more hand wavium than they prefer.

Because the change in mass, volume, etc is adjusted by magic. Just like the reasoning that the human brain is still functional in a spider and they know how to convert back to human. Magic. Not meant to be explained or have a concrete answer.

Quite a lot of fantastical magic works within rules - most of it really. Even shapechangers can do - people become 70kg wolves and cats which just about work, but not birds mice or insects. Fireballs that require a localised decrease in temperature etc. Even the belgariad notices that air has mass, and stones have inertia which magic doesn't alleviate.

So long as the magic system is internally consistent, or even a die-hard fantasy fan can give up in disgust.

>57 reading_fox: That actually is a more recent phenomenon. Old world fantasy, the magic did what it needed to do for the story.
Everything about the magic being consistent and having consequences, that happened because more recent readers started requesting it.

>59 gilroy: I think this phenomenon was created by role-playing games (or at least reinforced by them), where magic belongs in a detailed, coherent system with rules for how it works.

Yes, I like it when fantasy (& SciFi) establishes the rules and then builds the story within those constraints. That makes for fun reading when the author needs to be clever to logically work within the constraints of the world they built.

>60 anglemark:, >61 Neil_Luvs_Books: I think that's the attraction of the genre(s) for many of us; problem-solving fiction, where the reader shares the protagonist's intellectual challenges, whether the genre be sf, fantasy, detective or espionage. Just read the reviews/discussions when a writer plays fast and loose with their own internal consistency!

When I was earning my book money by testing computer software, I wrote a blog on this subject:

https://probetesting700171536.wordpress.com/2019/08/07/reading-for-the-curious/

>52 Neil_Luvs_Books: I could see the extra mass resulting in a decrease of a shapechanger's volume going to an extra-dimensional space for the duration - but what happens when the shapechanger increases volume and then needs more mass, where does it come from? The local environment?

>63 Karlstar: Yup, that is a problem…. Where is mass taken from when a shapeshifter increases in size? A parallel universe that acts as a depository for exchangeable mass? 🤷‍♂️