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Old 09-03-2010, 09:47 PM   #37
DMcCunney
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lake View Post
Recently another member here started a thread on the laws of zombionics, which of course dealt with all the laws about zombies and the like. So here's my spin on it for science fiction. What do you believe are the top rules of science fiction? Now, to make it more interesting, I'm looking for a top twenty list, but this will be broken down into two categories: Sci-fi Do's and Don'ts. IE, what things should always happen (or they are things you highly recommended should happen) in a scifi book, and what items should NEVER happen in a good sci-fi book. Let's hear your thoughts.
I can think of some guiding principles, but won't try to do a Top 20 Dos or Don'ts.

The biggest one, offhand, is that you can speculate all you want on what we don't know, but you have to get what we do know right. You may not have to go through the trouble Robert A. Heinlein once went through, where he and his wife Virginia unrolled a sheet of butcher paper on a table, each started at a different end, and they independently did a complex orbital ballistics computation, to make sure a spacecraft could get from place X to place Y in time Z as required by the story. (Bob had Ginny cross check because he thought her math was better than his.) But you do have to have your known facts straight, to avoid getting greeted with unintentional laughter. You can write an SF story where you send your protagonist to Venus, but you better be aware we've already sent robot probes and we know damn well that what's under the clouds isn't the tropical rain forest some of the old pulp writers hypothesized.

Another is not to get too enamored of a plot device at the expense of the story. There's a chap elsewhere who wrote a three volume series, and shot himself in both feet. He was exploring the effects of a certain circumstance, did a lot of research to bolster the idea, and learned everything except that the mechanism he was proposing to produce the circumstance wouldn't work that way. He could have chosen a different way to produce the circumstance whose effects he wanted to explore and told the same story, but he was too attached to a particular gimmick.

It was both an example of the first point I raised, and an inadvertent demonstration of a potential pitfall of self-publishing. A competent SF/fantasy editor would have called him on the notion and suggested a different approach.

Another it to be careful of your setting. The late SF writer editor, and critic Damon Knight once said "If it reads like it could have been set in Australia, it probably should have been!" A lot of bad SF is a standard present day story with a few SF tropes tossed in to make it part of the genre. The test is simple: if you remove the tropes, do you still have a story? Theodore Sturgeon once commented that an SF story is one that could not exist without the science component. If yours can, maybe you aren't writing SF.
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Dennis

Last edited by DMcCunney; 09-04-2010 at 12:48 AM.
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