In the spirit of NaNoWriMo, I’ve begun sharing what I’ve learned while tackling my first two novels. And, while you may not be reading this back in November, I figure it’ll still be helpful whenever you are looking this way. Last week I addressed Mystery. But the fact is that Mystery isn’t the only genre present in those two novels. Anyone who has read my novels will know that they’re something of a genre mash-up. Though they’re primarily crime novels centering on murders and conspiracies, they’re also very focused on Fantasy and Science Fiction.
To me, the combination is natural. As Arthur C Clarke once said, any sufficiently advanced science will appear to be magic. So the reverse would be true as well, any magical thing could probably be explained via science. It’s because of this that I felt it was easy to take creatures such as werewolves and vampires and use the odd quirks of biology to explain some of their traits. In my eyes this makes them more fantastic because it makes it plausible that they could exist in the same world we do.
So when I once heard from agents and publishers that the weakest link of Science Fiction was the “science” part I started a series of posts devoted to the genre. But I’m not so blindly devoted to Sci-fi that I believe it can do no wrong. Science Fiction has produced some incredibly bad works for a variety of reasons. In the end, I think it has more to do with how writers approach the genre than it has to do with the genre itself. And so, in an effort to improve the future of Sci-Fi, I now lay down some helpful advice for those of you just starting to step into that world of endless possibilities.