Rohan’s rules for writing science fiction that won’t piss him off:
- No DNA-changing virii or biological weapons that mutate people without killing them.
- … and CERTAINLY no changing them back afterwards.
- No plot-convenient memory-erasing to wipe either people’s memories of the events of the episode.
- No plot-convenient time travel or quantum-neutrino alternate-dimension wibbledy-fuck to completely reverse the events of the episode.
- No bringing characters back from the dead.
- And if you aren’t willing to kill off main characters, then don’t write stories whose narrative tension HINGES on whether they survive or not. It just won’t bloody work.
- No ret-conning events as you feel like. Make your decisions and just bloody STICK with them.
- No god-like creatures in the plot that can shift reality as they please.
- No planets where the “laws of physics don’t apply”.
- If you MUST use time travel, consider the following… You’re about to make either one of the best stories ever written, or one of the worst. There really isn’t any middle ground. Do you really want to do that?
- Pick your position on the sliding scale of sci-fi “hardness” and stick to it. Going for jet-fighters in space and big LAZOR-BATTLES? Well, fine, you do what you like. Going for Newtonian physics and a fairly logical depiction of space travel? Then you lose all rights to the absurd plot garbage listed above. That includes no prophecies or ambiguous “a wizard did it” horse-fuckery. I’m looking at YOU, Battlestar!
See, if we’re being really anal, the truly great Science Fiction takes the real world and posits a single “what-if” question. To stretch it a bit further, it sometimes requires a specific historical (or near-future) setting in order to work.
Want to know if your sci-fi plot works? Well, try this on for size. THESE are vaguely science-fictiony plots:
- Man re-creates dinosaurs using Genetic Engineering(tm).
- Man flies to Mars.
- Someone invents a way to let people live vicariously through androids, never needing to leave their houses for real again.
- A man finds a mathematical formula that can be used to predict future changes in hugely complicated systems like a stock market.
And this is not:
- In the future, mankind has space ships shaped like giant dodecahedrons because that’s the best shape to harness flibblety-glotchet particles which allow them to travel to distant galaxies like the disturbingly named “GALAXY 666″, which is where our major story point takes place: Captain Hacksaw of the NXX Awesome-LAZOR must fight dinosaurs that fly in space and breath fire (in space) at the space ships from the United Earth Battle Fleet.
I don’t know why I brought up the flibblety-glotchet plot line.
I think I’m just being overloaded with bad episodes of random things at the moment.
Seriously – when can we get back to some actual GOOD sci-fi, guys? Not seeing much of it these days.
Post a Comment