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

curiosity.
    Human beings also exhibit this love-fear attitude toward strangenessfor instance, we see the fear in racism, the curiosity in the way people slow down to rubberneck as they drive past an accident on the freeway. Our attitude toward strangeness is also a key element in the way we choose the stories we believe in and care about. If a tale we’re reading or watching on the screen is too familiar, it becomes boring; we know the end from the beginning and switch off the set or set the book aside. Yet if it is too unfamiliar, we reject the story as unbelievable or incomprehensible. We demand some strangeness, but not too much.
    Fortunately, no two people want exactly the same mix of strangeness and familiarity. Some are content to read the same stories over and over again, with only a few cosmetic details changed-or so it appears to those
    of us who don’t enjoy gothics or bodice-rippers or teen romances or literary novels about writers who can’t write or painters who can’t paint. Others are forever searching for something new or different, so they can no longer recognize the verities contained in old familiar stories-or so it seems to those of us who don’t enjoy literary experiments like those of Faulkner, Joyce, or Robbe-Grillet.
    Speculative fiction by definition is geared toward an audience that wants strangeness, an audience that wants to spend time in worlds that absolutely are not like the observable world around them.
    This is not to say that all science fiction and fantasy stories are fresh ventures into the unknown. Many readers, having once discovered a strange world that they enjoy, want to return to that same world again and again, until they’re more familiar with that imaginary place than they are with the real-world town they live in. Many speculative fiction readers who came to the genre in their teens, when they hungered for strangeness and surprise and wonder, continue to read in the genre well into middle age, when they long for the repetitive or familiar-and such readers find no shortage of sf and fantasy that will deliver the right dose of nostalgia.
    Yet even the most hackneyed, shopworn science fiction or fantasy tale will feel startling and fresh to a naive reader who doesn’t know the milieu is just like the one used in a thousand other stories. For the intrinsic difference between speculative and real-world fiction is that speculative fiction must take place in an unknowable world. At some point, every science fiction and fantasy story must challenge the reader’s experience and learning. That’s much of the reason why the genre is so open to the experimentation and innovation that other genres reject-strangeness is our bread and butter. Spread it thick or slice it thin, it’s still our staff of life.

    Boundary 5: Between Science Fiction and Fantasy

    There’s one more boundary that will matter to you-the boundary between science fiction and fantasy. That’s the boundary that I ran into when I tried to sell “Tinker” to Analog.
    The division is a real one. There are writers who exclusively write one or the other; there are important differences in the way they are written. There are even differences in the audience-common wisdom has it that more males read science fiction while more females read fantasy. The
    result is that the quarrels between fantasy and science fiction often take on overtones of the war between the sexes. And that’s only the beginning of the ugliness. Serious science fiction writers have actually published letters or articles in which they regard fantasy as somehow a threat to “good” science fiction, sometimes because fantasy seems to be crowding science fiction off the bookstore shelves, and sometimes because too many science fiction writers are being as “sloppy” or “sentimental” in their writing as fantasy writers are. Then serious fantasy writers respond with a passionate defense of their own field-and snide remarks about science fiction