Notes on Writing Science Fiction

Chapter 10/Science fiction

This is a link to a good list of videos on Science Fiction like concepts - useful for inspiration.  Places, things stuff. 

This is some stuff the sort of thing you shouldn't listen to. 

Ignore this. Yeah, the empires aren't very realistic. That's because what holds your empire up is about as important as the colour of the concrete.  The basic argument in this video is that if only the empire in star was more founded in economic reality then it would have been much better. Wrong. People care about the lead character's emotional arc. 

World building is overrated. It's fun thinking about but only in so far as it makes your character's story interesting and engaging. 

Bottom line - just because your world has a good realistic economic system running in the background doesn't make it a good book.

 Being consistent is more important than being accurate/real/correct. Having fun is good. 

Same thing here - surely if your book was more representative of real dystopias then your book would be Soooooooo much better. Wrong! ( better said with a sing song voice). Thinking about backstory gives you a chance of coming up with something original. Think about things which might impact your character's story. Avoid cliches try to steer cliches of and-cliches ( doing the exact opposite just t avoid the cliche ).  

What's most wrong with this video is that books can contain these things called 'metaphors' things which are not real but represent aspects of real things. People arn't evil but they can do evil things. How to talk about these things? How to recognise that maybe we are wrong? I don't know why not use a monster. So don't get confused, President Snow isn't a Starlin or Mao he's possibly a response to a diffuse academic system which keeps testing kids and making them compete against each other for limited numbers of funding for scholarships. Or it could be something else less easy to define but equally important to the reader. 

In cyborg's pet we have the ultimate slave collar. What made it work wasn't the internal logic of the device more that the collar was as reminiscent as possible of a mobile phone.  Like other scifi it was a tool to allow us to look objectively at a device which we all use (the mobile phone) but lose perspective on.