How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy Read Online Free PDF Page A

the way you think, from the person you are; it will inevitably show up in your writing, provided you don’t mask it with heavy-handed formulas or cliches.
    If there’s one thing you should learn from reading all these tales, it’s that, unlike many other genres, speculative fiction is not bound to follow any particular formula. There are a few formulas, it’s true, but most stories don’t follow them-or else follow them only because what may seem to be a formula is really a mythic story that has shown up in every culture where stories have been told at all.
    For science fiction and fantasy are the genres in which stories can hew closest to the archetypes and myths that readers in all times and places have hungered for. That’s why writers in other genres often reach for our tools when they have a particularly powerful story to tell, as witness Mary Stewart’s Merlin books, Mary Renault’s novels of the ancient Hellenic world, E. L. Doctorow’s slightly fractured history, and John Irving’s talking-animal figures.
    Writers of mythic stories don’t use “formulas”; they just tell the stories they bclieve in and care about. Inevitably, archetypal themes will show up again and again. But they only work if you are not aware of them; the moment you consciously treat them as formulas, they lose the power to stir the blood of any but the most naive readers.
    Boundary 4: The Literature of the Strange

    Having carefully explained to you that science fiction and fantasy are merely labels for (1) an arbitrary, viselike publishing category, (2) a fluid, evolving community of readers and writers, and (3) a ghetto in which you can do almost anything you like once you learn what others have already done, I will now essay a real definition of the terms.
    This last boundary is the clearest-and probably the least accuratedefinition of science fiction and fantasy:
    Speculative fiction includes all stories that take place in a setting contrary to known reality.
    This includes:

    1. All stories set in the future, because the future can’t be known. This includes all the stories speculating about future technologies, which is, for some people, the only thing that science fiction is good for. Ironically, many stories written in the forties and fifties that were set in what was then the future-the sixties, seventies, and eightiesare no longer “futuristic.” Yet they aren’t “false,” either, because few science fiction writers pretend that they are writing what will happen. Rather we write what might happen. So those out-of-date futures, like that depicted in the novel 1984, simply shift from the “future” category to:
    2. All stories set in the historical past that contradict known facts of history. Within the field of science fiction, these are called “alternate world” stories. For instance, what if the Cuban Missile Crisis had led to nuclear war? What if Hitler had died in 1939? In the real world, of course, these events did not happen-so stories that take place in such false pasts are the purview of science fiction and fantasy.
    3. All stories set on other worlds, because we’ve never gone there. Whether “future humans” take part in the story or not, if it isn’t Earth, it belongs to fantasy and science fiction.
    4. All stories supposedly set on Earth, but before recorded history and contradicting the known archaeological record-stories about visits from ancient aliens, or ancient civilizations that left no trace, or “lost kingdoms” surviving into modern times.
    5. All stories that contradict some known or supposed law of nature. Obviously, fantasy that uses magic falls into this category, but so does
    much science fiction: time travel stories, for instance, or invisibleman stories.

    In short, science fiction and fantasy stories are those that take place in worlds that have never existed or are not yet known.
    The moment I offer this definition, however, I can think of many examples of stories that fit