science-fiction

How to Write a Great Time Travel Story (without resorting to incest)

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

We all wish time travel were real. Unfortunately, it’s not possible. And I know that because I buried a note in my yard asking people from the future to travel to 2025 and help me with this video and also get me more followers, and in exchange I would provide them first-hand accounts of what the world was like in 2025 for small business owners so they could become famous historians.

However, even if it is as fictional as a loving marriage, time travel is a wonderful literary device that readers can’t get enough of. It lets us explore the nature of fate. It lets us view history through a different lens. Plus, we all make choices we regret. Time travel lets us wonder what it would be like if we hadn’t slept with that employee last year with whom you settled a sexual harassment lawsuit that tanked the value of your company and whom you also think is responsible for making sure your YouTube channel fails miserably.

Yet time travel can be a tricky thing to get a hold of as a writer. Dealing with all these logical paradoxes can be a headache.  You have to think of a good reason why a character should or shouldn’t have sex with their family member or themselves. You have to think of all the different ways people from the past were backward and bad. You have to think of a reason why falling in love with Andie McDowell would make your life better in any way whatsoever.

Still, time travel can be a wonderful playground for a writer who’s got nothing to lose now that his company is probably going bankrupt again and not even because of a fire this time. You can even use it to exorcise some demons. My time travel story, There’s No Place Reich Home, about a man who goes back in time to kill Hitler only to realize he’s one of Hitler’s descendants, came about after I discovered some Nazi paraphernalia at my uncle’s house. Interpol later explained he was the prop manager for a local production of The Sound of Music, but it still made for an interesting dilemma to explore in fiction.   

We’ll analyze past mistakes and see if some dicks can be unsucked on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Tip One – Choose Your Rules and Choose Carefully

Time travel stories generally fall into three categories: stories where the past cannot be changed, stories where changes alter the future, and stories where alternate realities branch off from the main one. I can’t tell you which one to choose, by which I mean I absolutely can tell you which one to choose and it’s the alternate realities one.

The great thing about this one is that you don’t have to worry about paradoxes forming because every decision the characters make forms a new reality. Also, people have a natural curiosity about the choices they never made and the alternate lives they could be living. For example, I bet most people watching this video wonder what your life would’ve been like if you married your high school sweetheart instead of falling victim to her mother’s sexual advances. Perhaps if you found a way to juggle both of them instead of confessing, that would’ve set you off on a career as a successful minister or politician.

Me personally, I wonder what my life would’ve been like if I had been in D&E offices the day the building burned down instead of in that fugue state.

Tip Two – Pick a great trigger (and hold off on pulling it)

The Delorean. The Phone Booth. The Hot Tub Time Machine. Make your method something unique and memorable. I’d avoid vehicles as they’ve been done to death. Your method doesn’t have to be a device at all. In There’s No Place Reich Home, the main character triggers time travel by shaving his facial hair into a Hitler mustache.

But it’s also good to wait until the end of the first act to trigger the time travel. We want to know the character fairly well so we experience the shock of time travel with them. In my young adult series, The Time Thief, I set up the main character’s Roblox addiction so we experience how difficult travelling back to 2002 truly is.

Tip Three – Choose an Interesting Backdrop (And Connect it to Character)

It’s never a bad idea to pick important moments in history to visit: September 11th, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the day Franz Ferdinand’s indie rock hit “Take Me Out” was released.

But even more important, the time period should connect to your character in some way. In my aforementioned There’s No Place Reich Home, it was important to get the character back to World War II Germany because his friends bet him one thousand dollars he couldn’t kill Hitler if given the chance.

Tip Four – Introduce Setbacks

Like any story, you need conflict. A great way to do this in a time travel story is to make the method of time travel malfunction or disappear. The Delorean, for example, wouldn’t start and needed plutonium. In my short story “God Only Knows,” the character of God, who had initiated the original time travel, got into an argument with protagonist Jeffrey and refused to send him back to present-day Sacramento.

How To Write A Memorable Dystopia (Step 1: Look in any direction)

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

Let’s start with a little exercise. I want you to take a look around you right now. Look closely. Look outside your window. There’s probably a hoard of vagrants below your window, each of them one talking dog away from murdering you the next time you leave the apartment. Look around your office. I bet IT has installed some new software that seems weirdly aware of your menstrual cycle. Look around the bus. I’ll bet the old man near you sounds like he’s going to cough up something that will take out half the Eastern seaboard.

The point is, you don’t have to look far to see signs of a dystopia. Go to any news website and you’ll easily find stories about how the Earth is quickly becoming unlivable. Or just type in the word Ohio and see what Google gives you. I’ll show you how you can take the world today, add a little sex and archery, and create a smashing dystopian novel on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Before we get started, it might be helpful to look at a few classic examples of dystopias in fiction and analyze why they work so well.

We’ll start with William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, which is a bit different from your normal dystopia. Instead of the whole world gone bad, here we watch an isolated society of young boys stranded on an island slowly devolve into madness and savagery. This story works because while the situation is extreme, anyone who attended a British school found it very relatable. But it was also a polemic for its time, and was instrumental in convincing the public why abortion should be legal.  

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World imagines a dystopia where the world is highly segregated by class, where people are controlled by meaningless sex and mindless entertainment, and there’s widespread abuse of drugs to make people feel numb and happy. While I don’t feel like this one could ever happen in real life, it’s still vividly realized.

Finally, we have Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents and Parable of the Sower. These books start out much like our world. California is a wasteland dominated by violent gangs, jobless migrants and people will almost instantly get killed for venturing out of their homes at night. After her family is killed, our protagonist founds a commune based on a new ideology preaching the importance of change. The only unrealistic thing is the populist authoritarian strongman who rises to power and becomes president, weaponizing hateful rhetoric and the slogan, “Make America Great Again.” That would never happen in real life.

Now let’s see how we can create dystopias as great as these.

Step One: Choose Your Calamity

As I’ve said, if you just watch the news for 10 or 20 minutes, you’ll probably be able to come up with 4 or 5 different ways the world is going to end. Maybe AI took over, everyone lost their jobs and with no labor to practice, Parrothead culture soon becomes the predominant way of life. Maybe scientists go too far, creating a race of super intelligent apes that enslave humanity, like in Planet of the Apes, a movie I never saw the end of. Or maybe a dictatorship rises to power after voters realize the only way to prevent it is to pick a guy who is pretty old. 

As always, it’s good to know your audience. Boomers and Gen Xers lived in constant fear of nuclear apocalypse, so that old gal still packs a punch for them. Millennials hate kids, so something like Children of Men wouldn’t be very effective on them. But they live in constant fear of being deprived of avocado toast, so any type of environmental crisis works great. Gen Z kids have spent their lives with one eye at their mother’s teat and the other on the computer screen, so any society that restricts access to technology will be gangbusters with them.

Step Two: Determine the power players

Dystopias generally come in two flavors: authoritarian and anarchical. But even in the anarchy, the narratives often involve a struggle for power and resources.

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale imagines a religious regime that has constructed an oppressive patriarchal society. Similarly, my dystopian sci-fi novel The Altar Boy imagines a matriarchal society where men can’t contest the results of a paternity test.

If you go with the anarchy route, have well-defined, competing ideologies. In Stephen King’s The Stand, for example, you’ve got one side who is evil, and another who thinks old black women are magic.

Step Three: Make it Believable

But you don’t have to get too crazy with it. Maybe, like in Fight Club and The Matrix, the dystopia is simply having a stable, well-paying job that is kind of boring. If that sounds a bit too 90s, interview some neighbors who work for Amazon to hear horror stories. And if you don’t have any neighbors like that, don’t worry: you soon will.

However, if reading the news or acknowledging neighbors makes you want to drop a toaster into your bathtub, then draw from your own life. In my aforementioned The Altar Boy, the men in my dystopia were enslaved and forced to procreate for a society of ruling women, and I based this off a series of trips to an underground sex club I took with my first agent.

Step Four: Pick an issue you’re passionate about

Write what you know. Like not smoking in your son’s classroom on parent sharing day, it’s just a rule you can’t get around as a writer.

Choosing a topic that you truly care about will absolutely show in your writing, and vice versa to ones you don’t. For example, I don’t particularly care for animals. In fact, I go out of my way to stomp on ants when I’m walking through the park. So I probably wouldn’t be the best person to write a dystopia about an environmental crisis.

But one thing I do love is wandering through hospitals. I love the hustle and bustle, the inherent drama, the joy that comes with being released, the sorrow of knowing these breaths are the last you’ll ever draw. So pandemic apocalypses were one of my fortes before Covid came along and ruined everything.

Do’s and Dont’s For Sci-Fi Writers

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

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 51st 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.