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.

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.

SF and Fantasy has a long tradition of supporting maps and visuals. Tell us…

• How did you (or would you) decide whether or not you wanted maps included with your work?
• How do you feel about cover art which explicitly portrays characters, vehicles or settings from your work? Do you think it enhances the reader’s experience?
• Would you ever like to see visualised versions of your work – graphic novels, illustrated editions, computer games, etc. – and if so what do you think would work best?

Meet the Panel

Alastair Reynolds	Jeff Somers
Alastair Reynolds was born in Barry, South Wales, in 1966. He studied at Newcastle and St Andrews Universities and has a Ph.D. in astronomy. He gave up working as an astrophysicist for the European Space Agency to become a full-time writer. Revelation Space and Pushing Ice were shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award; Revelation Space, Absolution Gap and Century Rain were shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Award, and Chasm City won the BSFA, and Diamond Dogs was shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award. His latest novel is House of Suns.	Jeff Somers was born in Jersey City, New Jersey. As a child he imagined he would be a brain surgeon, until a spirit-crushing experience convinced him that in order to be a brain surgeon he would have to actually attend school, work hard, and master basic mathematics. After a severe head trauma, he chose instead to write stories and learn the high art of cocktail mixing, and spent the next twenty years in a pleasant haze of fiction and booze. His latest book is The Digital Plague, which is a sequel to his SF debut The Electric Church.
Brian Ruckley	Jaine Fenn
Brian Ruckley lives in Edinburgh. After having a couple of short stories published in the 1990s, he took the start of the 21st century as a sign that the time had come to get serious about building up a bigger page count. His latest novel is Bloodheir, the sequel to Winterbirth. You can find out more about him and his work at www.brianruckley.com.	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 she has just completed a second set in the same universe.   Photo credit: James Cooke

Panellists’ responses

Jaine Fenn

I suspect a lot of writers create and use visual aids when writing – maps, diagrams of building/ship layouts etc – though whether they’d want them to be seen by anyone else is another matter. I have a badly  hand-drawn and messily annotated map of Khesh City in my desk; I found it useful to visualise where everything was when I was writing Principles of Angels, but it is not a thing of beauty, and I don’t think it’s necessary for the reader to see it to know what’s going on.

Yes, and despite my own feeling about the inclusion of such material in the finished book, I also make use of such aids in the writing process. With me it’s not so much landscape maps (because my stuff tends not to be like that) but structures, cities, huge space vehicles with lots of levels and sections. Sometimes these sketches come out of nowhere and give me an idea for a story or plot element, and sometimes they’re subservient to the story that’s already in my head. However I’m not very assiduous about keeping these things organised for later use. During the writing of Revelation Space I did have a 3-D, cutaway sketch for the Nostalgia for Infinity, showing how all the floor numbers related to different parts of the ship. I also had a map of Resurgam, showing the different human settlements. But if I had to go back into that story now, I’d have to rely on the clues in the text itself, since I’m buggered if I know where those sketches are.

I actually avoid creating visual aids simply because I would enjoy it so much I’d end up spending more time on the visual aid than on the actual story. I have a problem.

I do tend (rather unfairly) to associate maps with doorstop-sized fantasy quest novels, and (even more unfairly) sometimes wonder if the author thought they could cut a thousand words from said doorstep by using a picture instead *ducks to avoid virtual brickbats from other panellists*. Ultimately, if the author feels the map enhances their story, I reckon it should go into the book; if they feel they need a map to explain their story, then perhaps the story needs more work. I did consider whether I should include a map in the next book in the ‘Hidden Empire’ series, Consorts of Heaven, as it does feature a long cross-country journey not entirely unlike a fantasy quest. In the end I decided against it, both because the book is (despite initial appearances) SF, and because the nitty-gritty details of the journey matter far less than the experiences the characters have along the way, and the events that occur at the journey’s end.

I think it’s entirely understandable to associate maps with quest-type fantasy novels: most fantasy authors and publishers, and probably readers, make the same mental connection. Sometimes, I suspect, maps are specifically not included in a fantasy book nowadays partly as a way of indicating that the writer and/or publisher think the book’s a bit different from your average run-of-the-mill questing hijinks. Nothing wrong with that. I do think a little rehabilitation of the map’s in order, though. Historical and semi-historical fiction’s full of maps; historical non-fiction’s awash with the things; crime fiction has maps (in fact, I’m pretty sure the last one I read – an Inspector Morse – had a map in it); even literary fiction has maps. None of them seem to have the same vaguely negative connotations that maps in fantasy have acquired. I understand (or think I do) how those negative connotations have come about, and don’t think they’re entirely unjustified, but my personal map-love is stubbornly immune to their effects.

Regarding cover art, the policy of my publisher (Gollancz) means non-representative covers, so no characters or detailed settings. I’m fine with this, provided the cover gives a clear idea of the kind of book the reader is getting. In some ways, I prefer semi-abstract covers to a detailed and specific representation from the book, because there’s less for me to disagree with! Which is not to say I don’t like illustrations, both as a reader and as a writer. I know a very good graphic artist called Zer05um, who was the first person to represent the setting of Principles of Angels (he used it as a teaching project on ‘world-building’), and I love his pictures. Though I might disagree with an artist’s representation of a character or scene on one of my covers, I’d be flattered to see my work taken off into other media. For me, a cover is there to represent (indeed to sell) the book. However, once you’re talking about game, comic or film adaptations, it’s no longer just about your book, it’s people taking what you created and using it to create something more, something new. And since you ask, I think Principles of Angels would work really well as an anime.

Alastair Reynolds

I’m deeply ambivalent about all that stuff. I’ll certainly go out of my way never to include a map in one of my books – I’d rather throw myself under a bus, quite frankly. Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun is as complex and geographically wide-ranging a sequence of novels as any fat fantasy sequence, and he managed to tell it without recourse to a map. In fact, a map would have been a bad idea since much of the fun to be had from those books is in figuring out where everything takes place. Is Nessus Buenos Aires, etc? Certainly, there were times when I was unsure about the precise nature of Severian’s journey. But I’d far rather have the imaginative space opened up by that vagueness, than have everything pinned down by some exercise in nerdcore obsessiveness.

The Book of the New Sun is an inspired example to bring up on the subject of maps.  Wish I’d thought of that.  Sticking a map into it would have been a huge mistake.  I would say, though, that BotNS is some way out there towards one end of the scale when it comes to ‘imaginative space’: it creates an almost brain-melting amount of the stuff in a whole load of different ways (melted my brain, anyway).  Arguably, the prescriptive, literal implications of a map would fundamentally conflict with its entire tone and nature in a way they wouldn’t in most sf/f.  And though that’s an indisputable case of ‘Boy, I’m glad they didn’t put a map in that book’, I still can’t think of any book that’s left me with ‘Boy, I wish they hadn’t put a map in that book’.

I don’t think it’s fair to condemn all maps to “nerdcore obsessiveness”. Nothing helps immersion, in my opinion, more than a map (or other piece of visual material). That said, I see the point concerning a story like TBOTNS — a story I am still personally striving to comprehend in some ways. You don’t necessarily want to trade the aura of mystery and a certain amount of depth just for a fancy visual aid. But the maps in The Lord of the Rings, for example, rob the story of nothing and add a very enjoyable sense of reality—for that which can be mapped so meticulously might just exist.

I’m torn about cover art. I certainly don’t want photo-realistic depictions of major characters, unless there’s a degree of murkiness about the representation – character facing away from the reader, or in shadow. On the other hand, I’d like it if there was a way to signify to readers that there are actual flesh and blood people in my books; that it’s not all about huge spaceships. Very few crime novels depict the protagonist, and I suspect that’s the way to go – something that conveys the mood of the book without going into boring specificity. I’d be intrigued to see visualised versions of my work, so long as it was clear that each was merely one interpretation, no more right or wrong than the next one. I like the way there are now several distinct interpretations of Dune, differing in some ways and similar in others. Really, though, it doesn’t occupy me too much. I’m primarily a reader of prose fiction, rather than a reader of graphic novels, player of computer games etc. That said, I’m interested in illustration in its own right (once upon a time I thought I would become an artist rather than a writer) and there may be moves in that direction at some point, maybe along the lines of some kind of Revelation Space sketchbook or illustrated novella.

Brian Ruckley

Well, I love maps of any kind, so I’m biased. But everyone who read my first book, Winterbirth, before publication was of one mind: ‘A map’d be a good idea.’ That makes it a bit of a no-brainer to include one. In fact, my books have got a case of map inflation, because there’re three of the things in the second book, Bloodheir. On the whole, I’d say the first and by far the most important question when you’re trying to decide whether or not to have a map is the obvious one: Is not having a map liable to detract from the reader’s enjoyment? If the answer to that is “Yes”, or even “Possibly”, for a non-trivial proportion of potential readers, then have a map. As a reader, having a map in a book (whether it’s fantasy, SF, historical fiction, non-fiction, literary fiction – maps are by no means limited to sf/f) has never, ever reduced my enjoyment of that book; not having one has, on occasion, even if only slightly. But, like I said, I’m biased.

I love maps as well – stick me in a car with a roadmap and I’m happy as can be. So I guess I ought to like the presence of maps in books, but I suppose it’s not so much the inclusion of the map itself as what I perceive as the association of maps with a certain type of fantasy novel that isn’t really my cup of tea. But I accept that that’s a massively unfair generalisation and there can be very good books – very good fantasy books – with maps in. I do wonder, though, if there isn’t a certain type of reader who’ll always want a map, so it’s almost a given that they’d insist on one whether the book really needs one or not. I guess for me, a big factor in enjoying genre novels, especially SF and Fantasy, is figuring out the ontological “puzzle” of what’s going on; how the world works and how it all fits together. Shoving a map in at the beginning seems like a bit of a spoiler in that regard. Thanks, but I’d rather work all that out for myself! However, I fully accept that if the overwhelming feedback was to include a map, then it made sense to do so.

As far as cover art is concerned, without wanting to be too cold-blooded about the whole thing, its purpose is to tickle the eyeballs of the bookshop browser and seduce or intrigue them into picking a book up, maybe reading the blurb on the back. If the thing most likely to do that in a particular market or genre is a nice painting of the major character, then I’m all for it. On a personal level, I guess I have a slight reservation about illustrative covers, in that you could argue they might slightly intrude on the readers’ ability to visualise those things for themselves, but I suspect that if the book’s engaging enough the cover is soon forgotten and the reader’s own imagination takes precedence.

I have to admit that despite my dislike of literal covers, I must agree with this sentiment: If the publisher said to me, you’ll sell a lot better with this goofy drawing of your main character on the cover, I’d be hard-pressed to fight that. I want my words to be read widely, after all, and if a artistic, subtle cover is a hindrance to that, well, in the long run the cover is just window dressing.

I don’t really know, in general, whether or not such covers enhance the reader’s experience. Any cover, of whatever kind, can sometimes set the reader up with expectations about what kind of book awaits beyond it. In often quite subtle and unconscious ways, they put readers into a certain kind of mood, if you like, which might make them more or less receptive to different aspects of the story. Whether that’s an enhancement of their reading experience or not probably depends on how well the book delivers on what the cover promises or implies.

What he said.

In principle, I’d love to see as many different versions of my work as possible, visual or otherwise, infesting the world like a rash (it’d be a benign, non-itchy rash, obviously. Nothing to worry about.). Ten or twenty years for now, who knows how big the audience (or the income!) is going to be for a non-household-name author relying just on that paper and ink novel? The world’s changing, for all the creative industries, pretty fast and in unpredictable ways. Spreading your story as widely as possible, any way you can, has got to be a good idea for those who are lucky enough to get the chance. If someone wanted to do an interpretative dance version of my novels, I’d be all for it. What would work best? I was a big comic reader when I was younger, and have been getting back into graphic novels a bit recently, so that’d be a lot of fun. Back when I had time to play a lot of computer games (ah, happy days), though, I was hooked with a capital H on the Total War series: huge armies hammering away at each other on wide battlefields, clouds of arrows darkening the sky. Hours of bloody but harmless entertainment. My books have got armies and battlefields and clouds of arrows: it’s a natural fit, if you ask me.

Jeff Somers

I’m of the school of thought that believes there is no literary problem that cannot be solved with: More maps. Sadly, since the Avery Cates books are set in a future Earth which is very recognizably based on the modern world—just rusted and scraped and rotted out a little—including a map with the books never occurred to me, for obvious reasons.

I wish I could include some maps; I love maps. When I was a kid part of the fascination I had for the first books I ever read—The Lord of the Rings, The Wizard of Oz, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant—were the fantastic maps included. But to squeeze maps into the Cates books we’d have to either just Photoshop some Google Maps of New York City. Or possibly include a map of something completely unrelated to the story—my house, perhaps, or Lithuania. Although I think my publisher’s marketing department might be puzzled, and possibly angered, by that. And come burn my house down in the evening.

Maybe a lot of this has to do with touchstone works; the kinds of book we grew up with and shaped our tastes. For one reason or another I just wasn’t exposed to any of those books during my formative years (I was in my thirties before I read Tolkein!) and so I didn’t really get the map thing. Perhaps if Clarke or Asimov had put maps in the fronts of my books, I’d feel differently. Now I’m trying to think of an iconic SF work that has a map in it – is there one in Dune? I don’t have a copy handy to check, but I seem to remember that there was… [Ed: AR is correct, Dune has a map of Arrakis at the front.]

Despite my comments above, I’m also a map addict. I prefer maps of real places, especially ones I have visited / will visit, and the more detailed the better (mmm … contours). Having said that, I was that girl-geek teen with a map of Middle-Earth on my bedroom wall. There are certainly books out there that need maps; they’re just not ones I’d write, or tend to read. Al’s example of The Book of the New Sun is indeed an excellent example of a book that doesn’t need one.

I dislike covers that too literally depict scenes and / or characters from a book, no matter how artfully rendered. As a reader I always prefer to construct my own scenes and faces in my mind’s eye, and resent any intrusion onto that. I think about the covers to Jordan’s Wheel of Time series—nothing at all like what I saw in my mind’s eye, and simply for that reason alone they were excruciatingly disappointing. And a little irritating. Always made me want to burn down someone’s house.

Illustrated editions are often much better simply because of the author’s input—although, to be honest, I don’t really want to know what the author sees when writing the story; I like my interpretation. As an author I believe that once you let go of a story—once you release it—you lose control over it. It becomes property of the reader. If they want to imagine your main character wearing a tutu, that’s their right. While I would be delighted to see all sorts of interpretations of my work out there, I’d prefer they be “inspired by” instead of literal adaptations. Take the source, have fun with it, but don’t do a line-by-line presentation. This way people can still hang onto their own imaginings, no matter how perverse. And I think my readers’ interpretations would be really perverse.

Bookgeeks write…

Thanks to our panellists – and now its your turn to tell us what you think:

• How often do you, the reader, refer to maps when provided? Maybe you draw your own maps?
• How do you cope navigating fantasy worlds without a map?
• How representative (or otherwise) do you like SF and Fantasy book covers to be?
• Any favourite books that you think would make good Manga? Or computer games? Or films?

Are our panellists talking sense, or something else? Who do you agree with? Leave us your thoughts using the ‘Leave a Reply’ box below.