Welcome to the second Bookgeeks SF and Fantasy Author panel. Once again, we asked some of the leading lights of SF and Fantasy to give us their thoughts on a specific issue that affects them all as both writers and fans – and they said they would! Second time around, here’s what we asked our authors to ruminate on:

It was of course Arthur C. Clarke who said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

• How much do you think the technology of SF and the magic of fantasy have in common?
• How do you develop your system of future technology / magic?
• How important are the rules and underlying principles, and how far are you willing to deviate from them (rewrite the rules, if you like) to accommodate the plot.

Meet the Panel

Stephen Baxter	Pamela Freeman
Stephen Baxter was born in Liverpool, England, and now livea in Northumberland. Since 1987 he has published somewhere over forty books, mostly science fiction novels, and over a hundred short stories. Having worked in teaching and engineering, Stephen has been a full-time author since 1995. Visit Stephen’s website (opens in a new window)	Pamela Freeman is an Australian author of books for both adults and children. Most of her work is fantasy but she has also written science fiction, mystery stories, family dramas and non-fiction. Her first adult series, the Castings Trilogy (Blood Ties, Deep Water and Full Circle) is being published globally by Orbit Books. Blood Ties came out earlier this year and Deep Water, out in Australia and the UK, appeared in the US in November. Visit Pamela’s website (opens in a new window)
Sean Williams	Patrick Rothfuss
New York Times-bestselling speculative fiction author Sean Williams lives in Adelaide, South Australia. He is the author of over sixty published short stories and twenty-two novels, including the Books of the Cataclysm and The Resurrected Man, and is a multiple recipient of both the Ditmar & Aurealis Awards. As well as his original work, he has written several novels in the Star Wars universe. For a change of pace, he likes to DJ and cook curries. Visit Sean’s website (opens in a new window)	Patrick Rothfuss was born in Madison Wisconsin, blessed with parents who allowed him to make his own mistakes. Pat began college intending to study chemical engineering, only to graduate nine years later with a degree in English and minors in history, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and writing.Pat currently lives in central Wisconsin where he occasionally teaches at the local university. In his free time he writes satirical humor, practices civil disobedience, and dabbles in alchemy. He loves words, laughs often, and refuses to dance. The Name of the Wind is his first novel. There will be more. Visit Patrick’s website (opens in a new window)

Panellists’ responses

Stephen Baxter

I can think of three levels of how technology is shown in SF. First, you may know what a technology does, but have no idea how it does it. This is Clarke’s ’sufficiently advanced technology’, I guess; it just works and the characters generally don’t question how, as most of us don’t ask how our mobile phones work. HG Wells’s Time Machine was an example; there are lots of distracting details in the text but no specifics on how it functions. The tech of the city of Diaspar in Clarke’s own The City and The Stars is another example. I’d say the rule here is consistency; you can’t just have some gadget sprout new functions to solve a plot problem – and the same is surely true of magic in fiction.

Much, much better to let the technology/magic generate the plot and/or plot solutions. So often the weak point in spec fic is that the author hasn’t taken the time to consider how the different technology or magics they have included in their world will really affect their characters, the society, the history or future. Taking the time to think beyond the original ‘that’s a great idea’ often solves any plot problems for you, not by ‘working around’ the problem, but by generating new ideas which blows the problem (and, of course, part of your plot) out of the water. You have to be prepared to enjoy the explosion, of course. But consistency is certainly the rule in both types of fiction.

Second, you may have a vague idea of how a technology might work, but it’s beyond us right now. In my next novel Ark I’m building a starship driven by an ‘Alcubierre’ warp drive, a kind of wave in space. We have a dim idea how to generate such a thing, but it may (or may not) break the laws of physics, and certainly needs more energy than we can muster right now. So my story shows the characters going through a crash development programme, implementing my own guesses as to how these problems might be solved and get the ship in flight. Needless to say all this is integral to my plot, which is all about building the ship.

Can’t wait to read this – I love building the ship stories!

And third, you have technologies we understand very well but are maybe used in some new way. In my novel Voyage I showed how Apollo space technology could have been used to go to Mars. I worked out all the fuel loads, mission sequences, etc etc; once again I’d stress that this was central to the plot, the engineering was (partly) what the book was about. Even when I’m doing very ‘advanced’ stuff I try to keep in mind basic principles; for instance I get impatient with stories of nanotech dust which just ‘magically’ transforms stuff A into stuff B – nanotech will surely need energy and time to work. But the story is the thing. As I had one of my characters say once, ‘In case of emergency, break laws of physics’…

But break them HARD!

Yeah. Nanotech is sort of like faery dust for the SF crowd. Just sprinkle a little on your problem and it goes away….

Absolutely – and the end justifies the means.It’s fascinating to read your take on this, Stephen, because you write a kind of SF that I’ve never managed to get a handle on, and admire very much. The kind that finds the fantastical in the real and manages to spin a story out of it. I love real science, and I incorporate a large amount of it in my novels, but I seem to come at it the other way around: looking for ways to present the fantastical in as real a light as possible. The plausible impossibility rather than the unlikely reality. You manage both, somehow, which I find completely admirable.One of my favourite words is “verisimilitude”, and it’s one I have constantly in mind at either end of the story-telling process: when I’m world-building and editing. I’m happy to bend known scientific laws a tad, or even break them, as long as it seems as though there’s an adherence to the scientific method at work in the background. Paradigms come and go, but new ones always take their place. If I can get the fictional paradigm right, or the appearance of the same, then I’m happy. In Astropolis, I’ve tried to bend as few rules as possible–which is a big ask for space opera set in the distant future, but not impossible. I figure that if I can’t change the universe to fit my characters, then the characters have to change instead, and that resulted in a raft of interesting developments. That my characters can ride out a sub-light, 20,000-year journey across the galaxy by dialling their “tempo” back and having it feel like an hour seems like a viable way to get beyond the usual objections to interstellar travel. But that’s just one solution; there are probably dozens of others, and that’s one of the things I love about space opera. It’s such a wonderful playground of the mind.

Pamela Freeman

I’ve written both science fiction and fantasy, and I think the biggest difference between technology and magic is that for technology you have to work out where the energy is coming from. Magic seems, in many systems, to ignore energy cost. Some fantasy novels have the energy coming out of the magic worker, but the scales all seem wrong – a human body just doesn’t contain enough calories to fuel some of the big-scale magics.

So I think fantasy magic fudges the energy equations (and I admit to being as guilty of this as anyone else). Of course, some science fiction writers also fudge it – they gobbledegook a ‘new energy source’ which might as well be magic!

The best example of this is in the Matrix when they’re explaining how they farm humans for energy. Morpheus says something like, “the human body generates more bioelectricity than a 120V battery, and more than 25000 BTU’s of body heat. This, combined with a form of fusion, gave them all the energy they needed.”They do a good job of selling it though. It wasn’t until my second or third time through the movie that I heard that and went. “Hold on. What? ‘A form of fusion?’  What bullshit is this?” In my opinion, it would have made more sense if they’d suggested they were using networked human brains as organic computers. That would have been more realistic, given that they obviously already have neural interface technology. Electricity suddenly hard to come by? Dump your old metal servers and go human! They could even have brought in the whole apocryphal story about humans only using 8% of their brains. Why? Well because the computers are using the rest of it for distributed computing. Those days you feel slow and stupid for no reason? It’s not a cold, some AI out there is playing Bioshock and your subconscious mind is acting as RAM.

In the Castings Trilogy, the main ‘magics’ are accurate fortunetelling through ‘casting the stones’ and ghosts. A lot of the society in the books is based on early Norse society, particularly Iceland, and the ‘feel’ of the magic is similar to the Icelandic sagas.

Some characters also ‘speak to the local gods’ who are an animistic-type collection of spirits which some unspecified connection to the larger cosmos. There are also elemental spirits and other powers which are revealed through the second and third books. My premise was, therefore, that there was not really any such thing as human magic – that any spells humans performed they learnt from elemental spirits.

I didn’t plan any of this – it just happened as I wrote it, although the ghosts and gods were always central to the story, because I am interested in what happens in a society where you absolutely know that death is not the end of existence and where gods do interfere directly in people’s lives. The only thing I planned was to have a system of magic which was not very systematic – it seems to me that once you have a ‘system’, you have some kind of power structure that is based on it: college of wizards, council of mages, etc., and that would have added a complexity to the politics of the country which I didn’t want, as politically I had quite a lot going on anyway (nascent demoncracy vs nascent monarchy with a basic strata of racism).

At some point, I guess, we have to draw the line and say: “Beyond this point, I’m not going to bother.” Which probably makes us sound a bit lazy, but I reckon it’s completely reasonable. If we tried to imagine every detail of a fantasy world, and then tried to imagine how every element of that world interacts with every other element…well, we’d need a brain the size of Middle Earth just to get past the planning stage.I sometimes joke that writing realist fiction is a doddle. If someone writing a story set in New York needs names, places, professions, politics, whatever, they can just look it up on the web. Or walk out the door and experience if, if they’re lucky enough to live there. You can’t do that with fantasy or science fiction. We have the extra burden of imagining something that has never existed on top of trying to get every other aspect of storytelling write. Of course, we’re free to set our stories in our own backyard, as I’ve done with the Books of the Cataclysm and so on. Drawing on my experiences of the Australian outback was a lot simpler (and cheaper) than travelling elsewhere to experience snow (which I’ve never touched), raging rivers, forests etc. It’s also a whole lot easier to convince people that the world of the Strand is real when I feel like it is too, in my heart.

So the rules or underlying principles were pretty vague to start with, and I’ve developed them further as I’ve written the story. The only rule I’ve stuck with is one of names – I have an ‘enchanter’ who makes ‘spells’. The words ‘magic’, ‘wizard’, witch’ do not appear anywhere.

I do this too. Words like “Wizard” “Witch” and the rest have so much baggage attached to them. If you say witch, people are going to think of an old woman riding a broom. If you say Wizard, they’re going to think of a pointy hat and a robe.

Even though the rules are not set in stone, I have found that when I’ve come up with some plot ideas, I felt that they didn’t fit the world – sometimes because they would have made human magic too powerful, sometimes because they came from a different tradition of magic, sometimes because they would have thrown the plot out too far, often because they just didn’t fit the themes.

I think that making the magic and the plot indistinguishable is part of good world-building in fantasy – if you need to tweak the magic to fit the plot, something is wrong that goes deeper than that specific episode. It’s much more likely, I think, that you’d need to tweak the plot to fit the magic.

Huzzah.

Patrick Rothfuss

How much do you think the technology of SF and the magic of fantasy have in common?

In most books science and magic are just used as props. When this happens they’re virtually identical.

Take, for example, a light saber and Excalibur. They’re pretty much identical in terms of what they do in a story. They have different flavors, of course, but underneath the frosting you have to admit they’re the same.

Except lightsabers are much, much cooler. Seriously, though, I noted recently how the cool factor of lightsabers has been downgraded by familiarity. In the PS3 version of The Force Unleashed, it’s not enough that the apprentice is kick-ass with his red blade. The player can unlock a variety of colours and effects as the game unfolds. To a one, every male in our house wanted the spooky black one. Now that’s cool.

Most people acknowledge the difference between hard sci-fi and soft sci-fi, and while the line dividing the two is blurry, it’s a worthwhile distinction. In hard SF the science is one of the main focuses of the story. It’s a foundation stone, and it can bear up under close scrutiny. Soft SF puts story first, and kind of waves it hands about the rest. How does a light saber work? A transporter? Don’t ask. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain….

I think there should be a similar division in fantasy. In hard fantasy, everything makes sense. Your cities need sewers. Dragons have to eat. And your magic has to operate within a consistent (though not necessarily logical) framework. Everything fits together and bears up under scrutiny. In soft fantasy stories focus on other things, like in a fairy tale.

How do you develop your system of future technology / magic?

For me it’s magics. Plural. Just like there are different sciences.

I like my different systems of magic to feel realistic, so I base them on beliefs that are rooted in the real world. My sympathetic magic, for example, is based off the historical beliefs in hermetic magic and the laws of thermodynamics. It’s a very logical, rational system.

But for a different system, I pull from the old, universal belief that names and words hold power. This crops up all over the world, and all through history. It appeals to something layered deep down in our brains. That system of magic is very is very different. It’s intuitive and trans-rational. But it still has rules.

When fleshing out a magical system, I ask myself a few questions. “What impression should the magic have on the reader?” “What role do I want it to play in the story?” And, most importantly, “How will this effect my world on a larger scale?”

This last one is where many writers drop the ball. A very small technological or magical development will send huge ripple-effect changes on a world. If there’s a device that allows people to travel in time, you have to realize it’s going to have more of an impact on your world than letting Hermoine Granger fit a few extra classes into her busy schedule.

Hear, hear. And I’m also interested in what a change does on the smaller, more personal scale. What if love potions really worked, for example… think about stalkers, date rape and domestic violence and see what giving the perpetrators love potions would do… what about a society where people got married as we do and gave it a couple of years to see if it was going to work, but took matching love potions on the birth of their first child…? Stuff like that.

How important are the rules and underlying principles, and how far are you willing to deviate from them (rewrite the rules, if you like) to accommodate the plot?

If you’re writing a story and you realize some of the rules you’ve laid down are going to cause big problems later on. Of course you need to change them. That’s a good thing, it shows you’re thinking ahead.

But you don’t just change the rules where you saw the problem. And you don’t just slap in some bullshit workaround either. You figure out how things should be, then go back and systematically change the whole book so it reflects your new-and-improved rules.

If you’ve already written a book or story in the world, then you’re in a bad way. You never break the rules that you’ve set down for your own world. That’s a betrayal of the reader’s trust and it leads to a shallow, flimsy story that feels like you’re just pulling out of your ass.

Sean Williams

When I first moved from science fiction to try my hand at writing fantasy, I really struggled to build a world that didn’t rest firmly on scientific principles–be they the same as those we know to today or extrapolated from the same. There is always wriggle room in SF, of course, and there are tropes that don’t always demand explanation.  None of the fantasy tropes sat well with me. I kept wanting to understand them, so badly sometimes that I couldn’t move forward with the story.

Eventually I got used to them.  As long as a world is internally consistent and comfortable with its own kind of logic, I can work with it. That I can now move comfortably between those two mindsets probably means that I’ve grown a neural net specifically designed to outwit my early SF habits. I don’t care how it works, just that it does.

I try my best to avoid bending the internal logic, even if I’ve backed my characters tightly into a corner. It’s a test, and if I pass it, that means my characters get to pass it to.  Fictional people can be extraordinarily resourceful.  They’ll find ways around problems and mysteries, just as we do in the real world, using creativity hand-in-hand with the scientific method. Sometimes those solutions reveal a deeper understanding of the world they live in–and that, I guess is the optimal solution.  A problem is solved and the world is revealed in a little more of its glory.

Yes. That’s it exactly. I love clever characters. When things get complicated or dangerous that gives characters the perfect opportunity to shine.

I think, in order for your characters to work their way out of a difficult situation which you hadn’t anticipated, you have to give yourself time to think it through. It’s the hasty solutions which are often bad ones – our characters are cleverer than we are, sometimes, because the solutions they seem to reach in an instant take us days or weeks to come up with! I love the idea of ‘the world is revealed in a little more of its glory’ because I think that’s what a lot of people read speculative fiction for, as much as for characters and plots. For me it’s the defining quality of the genre.

Bookgeeks write…

Thanks to our panellists – and now its your turn to tell us what you think. Share your thoughts using the Comments box below.

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