Welcome to the third 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! Third time around, here’s what we asked our authors to ruminate on:

Both the science fiction and fantasy genres have a traditional reliance on ‘others’ – from extra-terrestrials and elves to angels and demons, these non-human protagonists are often central to the story. How do you set out to create plausible ‘others’ (do they even need to be plausible?), and make sure that readers relate to them in the ways that you want?

Meet the Panel

Alex Bell Alex Bell was born in 1986. She always wanted to be a writer but had several different back-up plans to ensure she didn’t end up in the poor house first. These didn’t work, so she started writing, and her second book got her an agent, while her third, written during her first summer holidays off from university, found a home with Gollancz. The Ninth Circle came out in April 2008. Now she happily dwells in an entirely make-believe world of blood, death, madness, murder and mayhem. The doctors have advised that it is best not to disturb her, for she appears to be happy there.
Michael Cobley Mike Cobley was born in Leicester, 1959, went to school in Clydebank, then attended the University of Strathclyde, to study engineering. He began to write with a serious intention in 1986 and is thus far the author of three novels, the Shadowkings Trilogy, and one short story collection, Iron Mosaic. His new space opera novel, Seeds Of Earth, is published in March 2009 by Orbit Books. Mike is an unreconstructed heavy metal fan, and finds FPS video games an inspiring way to justify procrastination.
Kate Elliott Kate Elliott lives in Pennsylvania, USA. In addition to the Crown of Stars series, she is co-author of The Golden Key. Her nineteenth novel, Traitors’ Gate, Book Three of the Crossroads Trilogy, will be published in Autumn 2009 by Tor Books (USA) and Orbit UK; book two, Shadow Gate, was recently reviewed on Bookgeeks.
Jaine Fenn Jaine Fenn studied Linguistics and Astronomy at university. She has had a number of short stories published, and has an active blog at www.jainefenn.com. Principles of Angels is her first novel, and a second set in the same universe, Consorts of Heaven, will be published in May 2009.
P.C. Hodgell P. C. Hodgell is the author of the God Stalker series currently being reissued by Baen: God Stalk and Dark of the Moon in the omnibus The God-Stalker Chronicles; Seeker’s Mask and To Ride a Rathorn (to be released in July 2009) in Seeker’s Bane. The fifth in the series, Bound in Blood, was recently turned in in manuscript. Pat lives, teaches, knits, and falls off horses in Wisconsin.

Panellists’ responses

Alex Bell

It depends on how you define “plausible.” I don’t think it’s at all important for characters to be reasonable, even if they’re Others. There’s nothing wrong with unreasonable characters – they stir stuff up and make things happen. But obviously they need to be believable, at least in the sense that they seem real rather than like cardboard cut outs. Personally I find Others – whether they’re angels, demons, magical species, whatever – more fun to write. I think this is because they don’t necessarily need to follow the same rules as humans so you’ve got more freedom and more possibility where they’re concerned. There’s something fascinating about characters that seem human on the surface but actually have powers or abilities or knowledge that makes them different to us.

Which also prompts me to think about the way that characters change, because one of the things we`re told incessantly is that in REAL writing the characters undergo change, whether for good or bad. Seems to me that it would be easier to portray character evolution – gradual or catastrophic – with human characters rather than authentically opaque non-humans.

I’ve always remembered reading this article about writing science fiction that was in a magazine someone had left in my dentist’s waiting room. It said that science fiction authors have an extra challenge with their characters that writers of other genres don’t tend to face in quite the same way, and that’s that we have to be able to go far beyond our own limitations and experiences. The article gave the example of the archetypal wise wizard (Gandalf, Dumbledore, etc.) who is practically all knowing and whose wisdom must, by very definition, extend far beyond that of the author’s. These characters have to be more intelligent than the writer who created them. They also have to be more knowledgeable and more experienced and more shrewd and so on. The author has to reach far beyond themselves – not only in what they are, but also in what they will ever be – in order to create them. “Others” require more imagination and they’re what make science fiction and fantasy my favourite genre. They stretch the limits of what you can do. And they’re what make the book countless different flavours of ice cream rather than just vanilla (please, God, let me be anything other than vanilla). They have a tendency to steal scenes and to take over the book. They are the cherry on top of the giant slab of cake . . .

An excellent point, but I must interpose a defense of vanilla in general and vanilla ice cream in the particular; really good vanilla ice cream is close to ambrosia, and has gotten a bad rap by being referred to as “plain vanilla”. By which I guess, to bring this back on topic, that making a choice to use Others in our fiction can force us as writers to move beyond the bland and easy choices we might make by default or through laziness. Then we can either add difficulty (other flavors) or refine the one we’ve got.

I don’t know if SF authors have an extra challenge when it comes to actually shaping these outre characters on the page – the challenge is more to do with the conceptualising that comes before. Surely writing characters requires the depiction of authentic details, traits, or emergent qualities – we`re not in the business of delineating a perfect simulacrum of a living being, rather we’re setting out to create the verisimilitude of a character who fits the story/theme or generates them!

As for setting out to create them – I find that they usually walk onto the page the same way that human characters do (although perhaps a little more forcefully). Obviously they need to have their own set of rules (even if not the same ones that humans are bound by), but their personalities are the most important thing because rules can be sorted out later. Clearly both Others and human characters need to elicit some sort of response in the reader. You can like them or dislike them, but you should care what happens to them one way or another.

You hope readers will relate to them in a certain way but I think all you can do is create the character (or present the character as they’ve presented themselves to you) and let people react to them how they want to. I just write the character down as I see them in my head, and leave the readers to make up their own minds. But I do think that Others are often integral to the book, and I don’t think writing would be anywhere near as much fun without them.

I’m with Alex on the added fun of characters who appear to be ordinary, but aren’t; we get the play with this concept to an extent unknown in any other genre.

Michael Cobley

Seems to me that the portrayal of the ‘other’ in fantastic fiction serves several purposes, the most obvious being the embodiment of good, bad, or enigmatic. In books like Gateway or Ringworld, the others, the alien builders, are enigmatic, while in Lord of the Rings the orc others are corrupted evil. Also, it seems that in order to present a kind of purity or essence of good, bad or enigmatic, the other-characters are seldom viewpoint characters. When you try to go into an ‘other’ character to present their viewpoint, as a writer you’re faced with two choices: either you attempt to depict a truly alien viewpoint, and run the risk of utterly mystifying and confusing your reader, or you humanise/anthropomorphise them, in which case you end up with aliens that are just humans in rubber suits.

Years and years ago I started reading an SF novel with alien povs written to be, well, alien, and I had to give up about a third of the way in. The author had done such a good job that I didn’t have anything to hang my identification on.

But is this so bad if you’re trying to tell a meaningful story, to communicate the ideas you want to get across? In Cordwainer Smith’s Scanners Live In Vain, the characters are humans from a far-future Earth whose motivations and terminology come across as surreal, yet the story is generally regarded as a classic of the mid-20th century period. Then there are the Tines in Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon The Deep, who are an alien race whose sentience derives from a psionic gestalt of several individuals; in the Tine sections, Vinge depicts the Tine characters as somewhat human-like, but also tries to show what happens to their consciousness when one or more of the gestalt members dies or is rendered unconscious. I wrote a story a few years ago called ‘Born In Eclipse’ about a similar kind of gestalt group, except that they were joined by a psionic symbiote in the form of a viscous plasmoid, some of which each member of the five-strong group carried internally. So that you had the separate and distinct characters of the gestalt and the overarching presence of the symbiote. The story ends with two survivors carrying away an unborn child mentioned earlier, only it is the child of the symbiote. In that story I kept to one main character from whose viewpoint you could see/sense the deaths of the other gestalt members; this was contrasted with flashes of a secondary viewpoint character, a mad, cyborg human who pursues them.

Lastly, you can use the character of the Other to embody a concept or philosophy or some ideological conflict. This happens a lot, although specific examples escape me!

Michael’s right about not writing ‘others’ as viewpoint characters; as soon as you get into the head (or other thinking appendage) of your ‘other’, you risk losing some of the mystery. But as he says, some stories need us to try and think as the ‘other’ does.When an author uses the ‘other’ to serve their agenda regarding a philosophical or conceptional point then I think we’re in dangerous territory, as there’s a risk that what should be a character/entity who stirs our sensawonder ™ becomes mere a mouthpiece of the author, with little sense of his/her/its own internal life. There is a branch of SF that consciously does this (the only proponent I can think of offhand is Doris Lessing) and though it’s certainly thought-provoking and highly intelligent, such abstract allegorical stuff tends to be a little too bit dry for my tastes.

Kate Elliott

I think that sometimes in SF&F the non-human ‘other’ reflects an aspect of humanity, a characteristic or trait writ large on an alien body, perhaps idealized or perhaps demonified. Or the alien-other exists within the story to create a kind of functional mirror in which the human characters can see their reflections. Other times, of course, the alien-other is an anthropomorphised form of an Earth animal made intelligent in the same way we fancy ourselves to be. The biggest danger in creating the alien-other, to my mind, comes when the alien-other looks a lot like our own conscious or unconscious prejudices.

As for creating plausible alien-others, I find myself limited in the usual ways: I have to get my own head outside my own expectations, assumptions, and prejudices, which can be pretty difficult. I try to make an alien culture seem to hold together on a level that makes sense to our human brain (even if it’s not our way of doing things). I avoid if possible making the alien culture any non-American culture (speaking here as an American writer) dressed up in fancy ears and odd whistling language.

Although I’ve never tried writing an alien culture I can imagine that it would be exceptionally difficult to do. A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay is the only sci-fi book I’ve ever read where the alien planet/culture seemed completely Other. Almost to the point that if someone told me that David Lindsay was really an alien, I would be strongly inclined to believe it.

Animal biology is an interesting place to look for some truly bizarre adaptations; the key is always to avoid straight anthropomorphizing unless, as in Jo Walton’s delightful Tooth and Claw, you’re deliberately writing dragons as a Victorian novel (and even then they have their own distinct biology which creates many interesting twists in the plot). Because my real interest lies in exploring “the human condition,” I find it hardest to create alien-others who are really and truly weirdly alien rather than an exploration of some aspect of humanity; some of my favorite truly weird aliens are found in C. J. Cherryh’s Chanur series.

I suppose creating anthropomorphic aliens gives you the advantage of a certain accessibility / identification for the reader, but it also provides the possibility of the ‘shocking difference’ which upsets the preconceptions and assumptions already played to. A lot of short stories from the golden era did this with twist endings.

Jaine Fenn

That’s is a great question, because as you say, this is the thing that distinguishes our genre(s) from pretty much any other, and the fact that we’re allowed (required, even) to use such beings in our stories opens up so many new and fascinating possibilities.

I think that the trick to employing ‘others’ is to try to make your beings powerful and mysterious enough to inspire awe/fear/adoration/disquiet in your characters (and hopefully, therefore, to interest and intrigue your reader) yet comprehensible enough in their motivations and actions that the character (or, more importantly, the reader) can understand something of what the beings in question are about. Not everything, ideally, because even if the reader knows more than the characters do (quite likely, given the characters are stuck in the story), there should still be a nub of the unknowable about such entities.

Yes, I think retaining an element of the unknowable in Others is really important. That’s usually what makes them my favourite characters in sci-fi books that I read. If they weren’t mysterious then they wouldn’t be so interesting.

I realise that leaving too much of the interpretation to the reader can create complications, especially if there’s a cultural difference between reader and writer, or if the writer has taken a concept that means one thing in our culture, and transplanted it to another culture where the meaning has been somewhat warped (as I’ve done with my Sidhe). As a writer, you can’t know whether the reader will relate to your ‘others’ as you do. All you can do is try to put in enough pointers to show how you’d like them to be seen in the context of your story.

And isn`t that the truth? There’s no way of knowing how a reader will read your work or what they’ll see in it. Readers are quite trusting, I think – they’re not specialists, like writers and critics, so their reactions to prose narratives are more natural, or even instinctive. I don’t mean this is a derogatory sense; ordinary readers are who we write for, generally. Sometimes I wish I could switch off my writerly knowledge and just read my stuff as a ordinary reader would.

As for making our ‘others’ plausible … that’s a hard one. It’s important to avoid making them into mere deus ex machina, the hand of God coming down and tweaking the broken plot. Readers may feel cheated by this, and quite rightly. But at the same time we’re in the business of bringing the apparently impossible to life. A tricky balance, but that’s the fun of it.

Yeah. I think we rely a lot on the good will (and suspension of disbelief) of our readers. But that’s all right because it makes it almost a collaborative effort!

P.C. Hodgell

The “other” can be anything as soon as your characters start thinking in term of us vs. them. “They” are alien to “us.” We don’t understand how they think or feel. Quite possibly they are therefore considered evil, especially if we happen to be fighting them.

So far, I could be talking about world politics.

In science fiction, it might be possible to write a story without an “other.” For example, put an astronaut in a spaceship leaking oxygen far from home. It could be purely a technical problem, solvable (or not) along technological lines. Readers interested primarily in technology might find this interesting. I probably wouldn’t. Ah, but add an A.I. computer named Hal and everything changes.

I think that the Ents were the embodiment of memory for Tolkien. He went through WW1 and saw many of his friends killed, and afterwards found that the world he had grown up in was melting away. The Ents remember the ancient roots of Middle Earth and their way of living is slow and stately. On the other hand, Lovecraft’s Elder Gods are the embodiment of vast, unknowable horrors which are too immense and terrible for mere human minds to contain and comprehend. And they’re always there, in the backstage of the cosmos, lurking behind the curtain, eternally ready to break through and wreak corrosive ghastliness upon the world, bwah hah hah! Which has certainly prompted much speculation about HPL’s acerbic attitude to the modern world of the 1930s.

In fantasy, the range of “others” is only limited by the author’s imagination — which raises a question: can a writer conceive of something truly other since all characters originate in his/her mind? Is the writer obligated to understand everything about said “other”? That depends, I think, on what or how much s/he wants the reader to understand. Compare Tolkien to Lovecraft. We don’t know everything about ents, but we know enough to predict, eventually, what one of them will do. If nothing else, trees are familiar, as is our affection for them. But what do we know about Cthulhu? What did Lovecraft know? Only enough, I suspect, to suggest the unknowableness of that whole tentacled breed of Elder Gods.

There are times I wonder how well I understand myself, which is perhaps what makes me willing to tackle an “other” whose everything I certainly won’t understand either!

I don’t think the author needs to know /understand everything about their Other characters. If anything I think there’s something really cool about the character being a little bit beyond the writer’s comprehension. If you could understand them completely then I’m not sure they’d really be Others anymore. More like pseudo-Others, perhaps . . .

Maybe that’s true in general about horror and many ghost stories. The terror is that we are opened to the possibility of an ultimately unknowable universe. No wonder some fundamentalists find such works “evil.”

The other reason being, of course, that fundamentalist, of whatever stripe, believe that transcendence and rapture, both individually and collectively, can only come from focussed, obedient devotion. Which is why they also hate and fear most rock, metal, and other musical forms.

Wasn’t it Stephen King who advised that you should never open the door for the monsters? If the monsters are behind the door then they’re unknowable and terrifying but as soon as you see the monster and know what it is, it unavoidably becomes less frightening simply because it’s not unknown anymore.

Fantasy, on the other hand, tries to lead us into at least a possible understanding, while keeping the tang of the strange. I want my “others” to be plausible; if one can’t believe in them, there goes the willing suspension of disbelief along with any chance of the reader engaging with them emotionally. I have to believe in them. To this end, I do research, preferably hands-on. For example, in my novels there’s a creature called a rathorn. These are generally equine in form, but they also have fangs, dew-claws, two horns, and ivory armor that grows throughout their life time, eventually entombing them alive. They’re also very smart and very bad tempered. For lack of a carnivorous unicorn, I started riding lessons and soon bought a green-broke six year old Saddlebred mare who had never been ridden before. Over the past nine years I’ve learned a lot from her and her son Pip, physical and psychological details to make both my rathorn and my other equine characters more believable. The irony is that horses remain primarily “other” to me. I only understand them so far and persist in trying to anthropomorphise them despite my trainer’s constant warnings. I understand my own creation, the rathorn, much better than I do Pip; but working with Pip and his mother has taught me what questions to ask in trying to approach their special sort of otherness.

In the end, I’d say that specific, “logical” details are needed to create a successful “other,” first, to convince readers that in context they are real; second, to engage the reader’s emotions; and third, to maintain a hint of the mystery that made them “other” in the first place.

A post-note: consider the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica. They run the gamut from menacing “other” to significant other. To paraphrase Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

The comparison between Tolkien and Lovecraft raises an interesting point: the further outside of mainstream society (and ideas of ‘normal’) a writer is, the more alien their ‘others’ often end up being. But as Kate says, you still need to keep them rooted in human traits – if you go too far, you make them incomprehensible, and that will lose some readers. It’s a fine line.

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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