Science fiction is, somewhat paradoxically, more about the present moment than any other genre. It’s very often about using new technologies and possible futures as a way of analyzing our present. Because technological advances have the capacity to change us in great ways. To give a quick example, if I had VR twenty years ago, I probably wouldn’t have rushed into a relationship with a stripper who turned out to be a serial bigamist. We’ll convert power to the main deflector and invert the tachyon beam on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Science fiction has been around for as long as man looked at birds, then at giant leaves, and wondered if he could fly. But in the literary world today, science fiction is a vast genre about a lot more than flying machines. It encompasses so much, but if I had to distill it down to one idea it would be this: it is a genre that weighs our aspirations against our roots, it asks if, with great technological advances, we can ever escape our true nature. For viewers of the channel, this way of conceiving it may be more relatable: think of it like identity crisis you experience when you a date a woman who’s young enough to be your daughter.

Like porn, science fiction generally comes in soft and hard varieties, but unlike porn, one category isn’t clearly better than the other. Hard science fiction is all about accurate science, with stories grounded in plausible technologies that are explained clearly and generally don’t violate the laws of physics as we know them. Light speed spaceships in these kinds of stories would turn their characters into a fine, bloody mist. Of course, you still have artistic license in these types of stories. A great hard scifi like Jurassic Park, for example, invites paleontologists to assess the safety of a dinosaur park, instead of, you know, people who do security at zoos.

Soft scifi is more concerned with the human side of things, the effects of new technologies on sociology, human psychology and political systems. In my science fiction novel, Pain and Fable, I tell the story of a society on a thousand-year generation ship. The story analyzes how the society of the ship evolves over time after the original colonists forgot to establish clear rules regarding incest.

Now let’s look at some dos and donts when writing scifi.

Do – Add some social commentary

Whether your scifi is hard or soft, your reader will expect you to whip out some truths bombs that connect to a present-day issue. Dune, for example, taught us 9/11 was inevitable, and 2001: A Space Odyssey taught us that the moon landing probably didn’t happen.

So try to find an issue that’s close to heart. Well, how about a story about two neighboring planets that have close trade connections, but one has a larger population and a more advanced military. An alien threat may cause the larger planet to take over its neighbor to protect it from the invaders. As you can tell, this is clearly about why Canada should be the 51^st state of the United States.

Don’t – Research too much or too little

The good news is you don’t have to be smart to be a fiction writer. The bad news is, you have to be able to fool people into seeming like one. Egregious scientific mistakes like claiming the uncertainty principle has to do with measurement or W and Z bosons are carriers of the strong nuclear force will get you laughed out of the building.

On the other hand, even if you’re going for hard science fiction, you can always get too technical. These are still stories, even if nobody ever reads them and they stay tucked under your mattress until you die from liver failure. Anyway, I made this mistake when writing Order of Operations, about a scientist who changed the Planck length of his atoms to allow him to tunnel through walls. Because I couldn’t really nail down the character and the conflict was thin, I padded the story with a 10-page definition of the Schrodinger Hamiltonian of the quantum system featured in the story’s climax.

Do – Bring a Sense of Awe

Your job as a scifi writer is to make the impossible seem possible. And because you don’t have Industrial Light and Magic to distract from plotholes and cliches, you really have to stretch your mind and come up with mindblowing concepts and ideas. Among my own stories, my personal favorite is Morton High, set in a future where minds can be uploaded to new copies of the body post-mortem. In the story, students at the titular high school play a game to earn colored wrist bands for all the different ways they kill themselves.

Don’t – Lose Sight of the Human Element

No matter how scientific your books get, remember that human emotion should always be front and center. Friendship, pain, loss, regret, addiction to abortions, jealousy over a neighbor’s superior garden, anxiety over immigrants coming and taking all of the jobs. These are universal thoughts that have been with us for a million years and will be with for another million.