So you want to write science fiction?

Forget it. I will have to ask you to raise your hands in the air and step away from the genre. Unless, that is, you happen to read science fiction. If you don’t, then all you will be doing is annoying editors, for very few readers will ever get to see your stuff, even if you end up self-publishing it.  Trust me on this.  I have seen what results when people think that they can write science fiction just because they’ve watched Star Trek and Star Wars. It’s also worth bearing in mind that those series were a couple of decades behind what was happening at the cutting edge of the genre even when they first appeared on the screen. The same goes for today’s television series and films; Avatar, for example, plays with ideas that were explored in Poul Anderson’s Call Me Joe. Anderson’s short story was first published in 1957.

But what I should really be trying to do is to encourage you to read science fiction.  Why? Because it deals with the things of importance, that’s why. Climate change? Cloning? The Internet? Nuclear conflict? Genetic engineering? All were explored in science fiction before they appeared on the general horizon and, more importantly, so were the plausible human reactions to those themes. Science fiction readers are used to the sound of the stable door slamming shut.

You will have noticed that I mentioned that the human reaction is important. It may have been true, a long time ago, that most science fiction was somewhat light on characterisation but that, happily, is no longer the case. There are still plenty of wham-bam manifest-destiny fantasies out there for those who want them, but there is a sense that the genre is rejoining the mainstream.  Writers such as Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson, Cormac McCarthy and Will Self are happily writing science fiction, whilst many of the jewels of the field, people such as Geoff Ryman and Brian Aldiss for example, produce books that cannot in any real sense be regarded as part of the genre. This is a journey that has been going on since the new wave of science fiction in the sixties and it is, effectively, restoring a freedom that writers used to have a century ago. H.G. Wells, E.M. Foster and Aldous Huxley didn’t have to worry about marketing categories. This all changed in the years before the Second World War. In the twenties, a magazine editor called Hugo Gernsback noticed that the readers of his technical journals were enjoying the occasional scientific short stories that he published, and so he decided to dedicate an entire magazine to this scientifiction. It sold well, other publishers rapidly followed, and a genre was born. This is the dichotomy at the heart of science fiction: it is at once both a marketing category and a mode of writing.

Douglas A Sirois illustration for Tim Akers' 'Toke' from IZ 210. This is obviously an old ad but if you add 'Incwriters' in the shoppers reference box when buying on line at TTA this February we will add 1 extra issue on 6 issue subcriptions and 3 on 12 issue.

But what should you be reading? There is still a healthy short story market for science fiction, both online and in print, and that is where you should go first. There are several Year’s Best anthologies that pretty much do what they say on the label. The Gardner Dozois-edited The Year’s Best Science Fiction (the British edition is called The Mammoth Book of Best New SF) is the biggest and most venerable and should serve as a good starting place. You won’t like everything in it, but pay attention to the stories that do impress you and track down the authors and the places that publish them.  Most of those anthologies (and there are several that serve the fantasy and horror fields equally well) will also contain a summation of developments in the field.

Naturally I hope that you will, eventually, find your way to Interzone. It’s been going since 1982 and anyone with a complete run will have a very good idea of the history of the genre in Britain since then, not to mention an excellent collection of prose. There is a website called Free Speculative Fiction Online which lists links to Interzone stories that are now available online and this will give you a taste of it. That link leads to stories as text and this one to podcasts of stories in MP3 audio format. The former site also provides similar links for the bigger American magazines (Analog, Asimov’s, and Fantasy & Science Fiction), and you will discover that all four have different flavours. Of course, there are many more magazines, podcast sites and anthologies out there that I haven’t mentioned, and we’ve barely touched on novels. It’s a big field and I wish you happy hunting.

And when you do find the strand of science fiction that delights you, then, dear reader, you have found the very stuff that you should be writing.

Jim Steel is the book reviews editor for Interzone.

TTA Press

This is the 2nd TTA Press Incwriters blog. The first was posted on February 5th. TTA Press are publishers of Interzone, Black Static and Crimewave. There are e reader versions of them all at Fictionwise. All three are fiction magazines containing original short stories. Between them they contain around 80 stories per year and that may well make TTA the UK’s biggest publisher of new short stories. Interzone is now in its 28^th year, Black Static in its 3^rd and Crimewave its 11^th.

Note the Tim Akers story, Toke, illustrated in the Interzone ad above is available as a podcast. US author Tim’s first novel Heart of Veridon was published  by a UK publisher following Tim’s short fiction appearing in Interzone.