By Joel Armstrong, Author and Write Michigan Judge
The great thing about writing fantasy, science fiction, or horror is that it doesn’t have to be real. When you get stuck, you can just make something up, and when you’re not sure how it works, you can just say it’s magic. Right?
Well, kind of. Making stuff up that’s logical and compelling for readers isn’t always as easy as it looks. In fact, the speculative part of writing speculative fiction comes with some unique challenges, but the made-up bits allow writers in this genre to explore concepts and ask questions we couldn’t otherwise ask.
This curiosity and freedom in speculative fiction is totally worth it, but here are a few of those unique challenges to look out for.
Building Realistic Worlds That Aren’t Real
Okay, let’s be honest, worldbuilding isn’t challenging—it’s fun, and once you start coming up with facts about why this government on this continent would be structured this way or how plant life on that planet would adapt to that kind of atmospheric composition, it’s hard to stop your mind from chasing down every last detail. And that’s fine when you’re just developing your speculative world on your own time.
The trouble comes in when you’re writing your story or novel and find yourself going on for pages about the minutiae of your alien species’ religious practices. It feels like a catch-22. Because, as a speculative writer, you do need to explain the magical or scientific realities in your story that affect the plot and characters, and that does take more description and dialogue than if you were writing about everyday life in our world. And it is part of the joy of speculative fiction to introduce your readers to ideas that make them see their own world a little differently.
So how do you decide how much worldbuilding is too much? Too little?
“The worldbuilding should serve the story,” Tade Thompson, author of the Molly Southbourne novellas, said at the Tor roundtable “Building a SciFi Future That Matters.” “While I may know everything about the place/time/setting, I will only give the reader enough to be able to follow the story and extrapolate.”
So what does the reader need to know at this point in your story? Not what they need to know next chapter, or in book 3. What do they need to know now?
Making Our World Feel Faraway—and Close at Hand
Another challenge of writing speculative fiction is that you’re intentionally pulling your readers beyond their world into an unfamiliar place—and unfamiliar can be uncomfortable. The beauty of this, of course, is that this unfamiliar place can give readers perspective, can help them see the world or other people or themselves with new clarity.
Stay too close to our world, and the reader will ask, “Where’s the magic?” Pull them too far away from what they know, and they’ll feel alienated, have trouble relating to the characters and conflicts, or just get bored. There’s a reason there aren’t too many sci-fi stories out there where the point-of-view character is a non-sentient invertebrate on an ocean world whose main desires are finding their next meal and reproducing before they die. (There are many reasons, however, that a film like My Octopus Teacher, which shows the many unexpected emotional and relational resonances between a human and an ocean-dwelling invertebrate, is can’t-stop-watching amazing.)
Becky Chambers, in her Hugo Award–winning novella A Song for the Wild-Built, demonstrates this balance between the familiar and the unfamiliar beautifully. Despite being set on a moon far from Earth, many of the scenes involve deceptively mundane activities—brewing tea, changing careers, hiking in the woods, sitting around a campfire. In introducing a wild-built robot to all the mundane particulars of their human life, however, Sibling Dex—and the reader through them—must continually stop to ask themself, Why do I feel that way about food? Why is my relationship to the natural world the way it is? Where does my need for purpose come from? By bridging the human with the alien, Chambers is able to ask about the human experience in ways she couldn’t otherwise.
Imagining the World We Want to Live In
A fairly natural follow-up question to What kind of world do I live in? is So what kind of world do I want to live in? Ursula K. Le Guin put it this way: “Fantasy is a literature particularly useful for embodying and examining the real difference between good and evil.”
Or, in other words, speculative writers have the challenging but exhilarating job of painting future or faraway places that reveal to us the kind of world we do or don’t want to live in.
Climate fiction like Catherynne M. Valente’s The Past Is Red, with its massive trash islands and tiny scraps of scarce resources, paints a dire picture of a world we don’t want to live in. Dystopia fiction in general has a long history of showing the negative consequences of harmful political structures, cultural values, or individual choices, from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to Donna Barba Higuera’s The Last Cuentista, which showcases the horror of life without history, storytelling, or cultural diversity.
Many speculative stories, however, describe worlds with good bits and bad bits intermixed, like Nnedi Okorafor’s Noor, which imagines a world of highly transferrable renewable energy that is still crippled by corporate greed and sexism. Noor left me with uncomfortable but valuable questions: Even if, technologically speaking, we could provide clean energy for everyone in the world, would we actually?
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The kinds of worlds and magic possible in the speculative genre are almost limitless, but it’s that very freedom that creates unique challenges for writers. Whether it’s worldbuilding, reflecting on our world, imagining the future, or some other challenge, they make the genre as exciting as it is—and totally worth writing well.
Even if you are just making stuff up. Kind of.