Engineering fiction.

On science fiction.

Science fiction is really just normal fiction - the same kinds of protagonist, the same drama and the same suspense. Only its wrapped around, and is in turn wrapped around by, a veneer of 'science'. That 'science' is a plot device used by the author as an excuse to make the impossible but beautiful things he wants to write about sound plausible. In that sense its actually all fantasy fiction. Only they use 'science' instead of magic and technobabble instead of spells to let amazing things happen. But good science fiction (hard sci-fi as some call it) takes that all one step further. It takes science and technology and uses it to create a possible universe. An extraordinary universe, but a plausible one none-the-less .And that makes it immeasurably more wonderful.

Btw, here is a quote from the (now unfortunately deceased) grand old man of sci-fi, Arthur C Clarke himself:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

So, with that out of the way, lets have a look at what makes good sci-fi shall we?

Good sci-fi needs a good story. That's the real matter that pervades it. But that isn't what I'm going to talk about. The stuff of drama isn't my forte. The stuff of science, the science of building things in particular, however is. So we shall simply skip this topic and head on the the universe building. And that starts with the concept of setting.

In a sci-fi setting is everything. The setting of a science fiction story is the set of rules, technology (this comes under 'rules' to an extent), worlds, cultural artifacts and other things that define the universe the protagonists dwell in/ the author explores. In conventional fiction setting is largely defined in the readers mind. The beach is like any beach, the island, the city, the town and the desert are all concepts familiar to normal people and so the author merely has to add specific detail to those templates.

But in sci-fi the setting is so much more. The author is free to build and create ships and planets and phenomenon which are far beyond mundane knowledge. And that setting, the universe that affects the beings in it, is paramount! For it is the fabric upon which the story is built. But how do you build that setting? You might envision an alien planet for example. A planet where amazing things happen. But how do you define those things and make them tangible. There is a thin line between good science and fantasy-science (Star Trek sits firmly upon the fantasy side of things. As do most space operas) and a firm understanding of the rules of your universe are essential to building good, serious, science fiction.

What this means is that you have to explore and understand the technology you will introduce and use in your universe. And not just the technology. The way various beings react, the way some strange phenomenon behaves and the limitations and capabilities of everything. These rules lay the foundation of your universe. That transporters will not work through shields (Star Trek) or that lasguns and shields interacting lead to horrible explosions (Dune) are examples of rules. They form a framework for the story to exist in. Rule systems let readers know the limits and capabilities of things that they ordinarily wouldn't be expected to know (often, since you made them up just for this story). This lets them experience suspense, understand actions and generally loose themselves in the worlds you have created and the story you have woven for them. Of course, rules needn't be spelled out explicitly at the beginning of the book. And they needn't be exactness incarnate either. But you must communicate them through elements of your story.

The rules in good science fiction necessarily derive from real science. Note that point and note it well. Humans have evolved to intuitively understand the laws of physics and most readers of science fiction have a fair understanding of the popular versions of the latest in theoretical and practical science. This means that any nonsense in your work will stick out like a sore thumb to the bulk of your readers. You therefore generally take real world science and extrapolate from its implications. You obviously might have to bend rules and extrapolate things beyond their domains to keep your story intact but the rules that govern the 'impossible' in your universe must be as solid and unshakable as possible.

And here is where the crux of it all lies. Science is largely known. We have already discovered the vast majority of possible things and those things we don't really know can either be guessed at with fair accuracy (from a science fiction author's perspective, not a particle physicist's) or don't matter much as they are the stuff of detail.

That fact, that 'new science' is a mostly dead end* (again, from a sci-fi author's perspective), is the reason a good science fiction author's intellect is important. For it now lies upon him to develop extraordinary ideas and concepts from those facts that science gives us. In effect, he is not the author of science fiction, for the science has been largely defined for him, but of engineering fiction. And it is in that task, the forging of amazing things from a cauldron of bland laws, that the greats truly shine.

*My opinion only. And I might well be suffering from the same hubris that led 19'th century scientists say that they had discovered all that there was to be discovered.

PS: There is a really nice series of podcasts called 'writing excuses' that dwells in detail upon several of the ideas I have presented here. Two – one on sci-fi genre and another on magic rule systems stand out. Do look it up.