The Future We’ve Already Seen
I was reading a big fat space opera the other day. You know the kind. You’ve already read about this future. It’s the clunky 1970’s future full of dead rocks, long haul shipping, out-of-control corporations, more-or-less traditional gender dynamics glossed over by the inclusion of some “strong female characters,” and, absurdly – smoking in space stations(!?).
When I went to the Clarion writing workshop back in 2000, I had an instructor tell me that one of my stories suffered from “a failure of the imagination.” If you take a real hard look at most SF/F, you can probably say the same thing. There’s a conservative, comfortable bulk of the genre that just keeps writing about the same future, and exploring the same past. There’s good reason for this. People like comfortable fiction. They like seeing their present reflected in the future. Most importantly, it sells well.
But it’s lazy writing.
For me, the most satisfying part of what I do as a storyteller is to interrogate the assumptions we have about what it means to be human. As spec fic writers, we have this fantastic canvas we totally cut up, rearrange, back over, throw mud at, or burn down on command. The world is literally a blank page, and all that limits what we put on that page is the narrowness of our own thoughts and expectations.
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In every world, there is another world, and another one inside of that. Little boxes, all these houses, with alternate realities inside of them. Worlds are not created by the gods on high, I think. They are created by a trillion sensing entities, experiencing what they experience, communicating what they know to each other, and changing their world as they can. There is a material reality to reality. There is also a social reality to reality. They intersect. The material reality is an immutable thing. Gravity works. Thermodynamics works. But, the meaning of the mute working of things comes from the interpretation of the reality.
That title is a Crystal Method “Trip Like I Do” reference. Did you notice? Some of you understood right away from that reference that I listen to electronic music (or at least had listened to it) without my ever telling you so up front, and therefore, got a peek into my everyday life in a flash. The fact that it’s a song that came out in 1997 could indicate a million other things. Think about it. It definitely indicates I live in a time and place where computers and electronics are an important cultural factor. The deal is, it’s a telling detail. That is world-building. Creating a believable fantasy setting isn’t about sketching a detailed map and writing 1200 years of history and then infodumping that onto the reader in a wordy prologue — although that information can be helpful to the writer. Creating a realistic setting is like research, in that it too is an iceberg of information with which the writer is intimately familiar and the reader only experiences the tiny bit that appears above the waterline.
Stanley Kubrick, when he’d decided to film Thackeray’s novel Barry Lyndon, spent some time researching eighteenth-century costumes. Then he went to all the major film and theatrical costumiers, but was unsatisfied with what they offered him. His research had shown him that eighteenth-century ladies’ gowns were stitched in a particular way which wasn’t reproduced by modern costumiers. Only with the authentic eighteenth-century stitching, he concluded, could the gowns be made to hang authentically. So he ignored the costumiers, and had the ladies’ gowns for Barry Lyndon made to his own specification.
Good morning. Today I am here to write about creating fantasy settings, which would be a wonderful thing for you to read, if I knew anything about that.