photog’s Second Law of Science Fiction

Yesterday I formulated my first law of science fiction:

photog’s First Law of Science Fiction – Thou shalt not change more than one basic law of physics when making a good story.

Well, that was so much fun I thought I’d try for another one:

photog’s Second Law of Science Fiction – Thou shalt not bore the poor reader to death.

And really this should be the first law because it really is essential.  Honestly, if the reader is interested, he will probably forgive anything else; excessive use of time travel, repetitive battle scenes, gratuitous sex and violence, even scurrilous attacks on political enemies.  As long as the story keeps the reader’s interest, it’s a success.

Now this is an iron law for any kind of fiction.  But because different genres have different readers it behooves the author to pay attention to what his particular genre considers interesting.  So, if you write romantasy you must make sure you include plenty of female protagonists being ravaged by minotaurs or some other equally absurd mythical beast.

But if you write science fiction and especially if you write hard science fiction you have to make sure you can pass the science literacy test when it comes to the gadgets and phenomena that you hang your tale on.  So, that’s step one.

Step two is to make the characters and the plot interesting.  And this is where some of the best hard sf writers are found lacking.  For myself, personally, Arthur C Clarke seemed to have a hard time writing characters that were actual people.  Most of the time there just didn’t seem to be a recognizable human being on the page.  And I’m not saying he was a bad writer.  He wasn’t.  He was quite skilled.  It just seemed that he didn’t care about the human aspect in the story.  Now compare this to Isaac Asimov.  When I recently (four or five years ago) reread the Foundation books I thought the plot was at times marginal.  But even the less developed characters seemed to have recognizable voices and personalities.  Asimov managed to make the characters seem somewhat alive.  And live humans are interesting to live humans.  And since the people buying books are (for the most part) live humans it becomes critically important to write characters that appeal to the book buying public.

And that is why even the most technically savvy sf author must (in my opinion) learn how to simulate human characters.  And that is okay.  Because we don’t expect Tolstoy.  You can make the characters resemble almost any humans you’ve ever met.  In fact, it’s better if you mix it up and include a bunch of different types.  This will help to avoid the serious problem of all your characters sounding and thinking exactly like you.  And believe me, that is a big problem.

So, I guess the second law means that a good science fiction writer must also be a good writer in general if he doesn’t want to fail miserably.