One of the principal attractions (to me) of writing science fiction is that you get to create your own world. This even has a technical term (it’s called world building!), and formed part of the syllabus of the one day course is writing SF that I did three years ago.
Of course, any form of creative writing involves a bit of this, but with mainstream fiction you’ve got much more to go on! SF and Fantasy require much more creativity in this regard as you’re often starting from scratch. This has its own perils; fantasy and sword and sorcery novels in particular tend to suffer from a plethora of daft (sometimes faintly ludicrous) names for things, people, beasts, countries, worlds etc etc.
To avoid this I’ve tried to ground my narrative with a greater sense of realism by writing the near (and hopefully horribly plausible) future. It’s really an alternative history (currently a popular genre, with the success of Amazon Studio’s television adaptation of Philip K Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle), but this is future history rather an alternative past!
As I’ve said, this notion is extremely seductive as you get to play God, but also extremely satisfying and comforting as you create a world that you, the author, can escape to. And Lord knows we need that at the moment!
Mainstream critics (and even some authors) can be extremely disparaging about speculative fiction of all kinds; but this is essentially grounded in ignorance and a rather sniffy attitude towards genre fiction in general!
Any decent SF (or Fantasy) novel will contain all the characterisation, narrative experimentation, and philosophical speculation of a comparable mainstream novel, but in addition will require the creation of a convincing world, right down to the last detail! This is very complex and challenging and some of our (so-called) critics should give it a try!
One of the most challenging aspects is the so-called timeline (i.e. keeping all your ducks in a row temporally!), and the foregoing diatribe serves to introduce a new feature coming soon to the Lights in the Sky site; the Alpha Mission timeline, which will soon be added by my good friend Rob Tyler.
CE Stevens April 2017