Orienting the Disoriented: A Craft Essay on Setting in Science Fiction

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Orienting the Disoriented: A Craft Essay on Setting in Science Fiction
by Sarah Einstein
Redstone Science Fiction

In Science Fiction setting can be defined by its list of tropes. You can be pretty sure something is a Sci-fi setting if it’s set in the future, different realities, other timelines, elsewhere in the galaxy, or uses nonexistent science and technology. No matter the background variation, the central requirement for the Science Fiction setting is that science or technology is a key aspect. –FreeSpacer

As a genre, Science Fiction is largely defined by setting. If I give you a story to read and tell you that it’s scifi, you know that we are probably not here; if we are here, we are probably not now; and if we are both here and now, things are about to get very weird, probably either because extraterrestrials are stopping by to visit or someone has just invented something that changes everything. The science and technology available to your characters will define what they do and how they do it. If your story could be set down the block at your friend Joe’s apartment, with existing technologies and no intervening aliens, you might want to reconsider calling it science fiction. Maybe it’s magical realism. Maybe it’s slipstream. But it isn’t science fiction unless it somehow takes the reader out of the here and now and transports her to a place where science and technology change what is possible

What does this mean to you as a writer? First, it means you have to be a lot better at this part of your craft than, say, the authors of Westerns or Historical Fiction. You can reasonably assume readers will understand the sentence, “Dakota road the bay mare over the prairie, his bedroll and pack lashed to the back of the saddle and his gaze settled on the moon rising over the horizon.” But what if Dakota is instead riding a machine you’ve invented to take him across the icy plains of a distant planet, staring at a multi-colored sky that contains three moons? Well, now you have a little more explaining to do.

But here’s the rub; you also have to be certain not to explain too much. What does your reader need to know about the setting of your story in order to understand the actions of the characters, and what details can you leave out? We’ve all read bad scifi that’s overburdened with world building. Imagine that I rewrote our sentence about Dakota this way; “Dakota road the new model of the SF-3461 Alien Terrain Vehicle across the orange-tinted, sulfur-rich ice plains of Seraphim, the fifth planet in the Augustinian solar system; his extra pressure suit with the shatter-proof glass helmet and oxygen-recycling system stowed along with his seismic activity recorder and gas chromatograph in the rear compartment, his eyes on the two moons and one man-made satellite visible just over the horizon.” Let me guess. You don’t want to read the rest of that story, do you? That’s okay, I promise not to write it.

When I write science fiction, though, it often starts off very much like that; full of details that the reader doesn’t need but that I, as the writer, do… at least until I am done with the first draft. In fact, I want more detail. I want to know if he has emergency rations and a canteen, how the vehicle is powered, the names of the moons, and the origin and purpose of the moon-sized artificial satellite visible in the evening sky. Many writers start scifi projects by world-building; because I deal almost exclusively in short-form, though, I tend simply to write in all sort of ancillary details and then simply remove the unnecessary ones during the editing process. Does Dakota ever use that extra pressure suit? If not, out it comes. Does he get meaningful results from his gas chromatograph or does the type of equipment he carries give us insight into his reason for being on the planet in the first place? If so, those details stay. And on and on.

My finished stories often end up being less than a third as long as the first draft. The rich details that are the hallmark of good science fiction novels—or series of novels—simply don’t work in short form writing; they slow the pace and the work the reader has to do seldom pays off in a short story arc.

Setting should also be integrated into the narrative of the story in small bits, rather than presented in a long series of paragraphs. Beginning science fiction writers often front-load their work with all the information they think the reader needs to place themselves within the world of the piece. But readers seldom retain disconnected details provided in quick succession; this writing is, at best, wasted and, at worst, bores the reader and they put down your piece before the real story begins.

Here is an example of a deadly first paragraph:

The year was 2127 and Earth had long been one large housing project for those without the resources to move to the safer, more elegant space stations orbiting the outer planets. Most planet-bound people survived by trafficking in the shadow economy; growing opium poppies or distilling old-fashioned corn liquor to be smuggled aboard the off-planet suburbs for wealthy buyers nostalgic for the old vices. Plague ran rampant in the urban areas, starvation killed off whole outposts of back-to-the-land idealists in rural areas. Government had been replaced by corporate ownership centuries before; with a few exceptions, Earthers were illegal squatters living on land owned by the large energy and agri-business conglomerates who produced the raw materials needed to keep the space stations in food and fuel. Every so often, the large terra-forming robots would raze an entire city neighborhood to make room for a soy-bean farm or nuclear power plant. Those who didn’t get out of the way quickly enough were ground into the soil by the machines’ giant augers or crushed underneath their forty yard long treads.

Here is a better way to open this story:

Nila walked from her job in the hashish fields in Old Central Park to the burnt-out shell of an apartment building she shared with a few hundred other families in the center of what used to be New York’s Upper West Side. In the distance, she could hear the giant terra-forming robots razing another section of Manhattan. It seemed to her that every week some new part of the city was destroyed to make room for fields of soybeans or another nuclear power plant to feed the endless demands of the affluent folk who lived on the space stations orbiting the outer planets. Twice, she’d had to bundle her two children up in the night and flee when the great machines appeared unexpectedly in her neighborhood. Now, she was careful to track their movement so that she could keep her family one step ahead of the destruction. Safe places to live were scarce, and she wanted her children to grow up as far away from the dangers of this world as possible.

Why is the second opening better? Because it places the observations inside the mind of the main character, which imbues them with meaning and identifies the way in which they are relevant to the story arc. The elements of the setting now tell us crucial details about the protagonist, and we expect that this story will be largely focused on Nila’s struggle to keep her family alive in this dystopic version of a future Manhattan.

Still, though the second version is better, it’s still not great. I doubt a story that began this way would pass muster with the editors of Redstone Science Fiction. It’s still far too expository, overwhelming the reader with details that would have been better introduced more artfully woven into the dialogue and action of the story. But you see the point, none the less. Setting must be revealed as the characters experience it, and not in one great, expository lump, if you want to draw the reader into your story.

Finally, I’d like to talk about what this craft essay has to do with Redstone Science Fiction’s current contest, Toward a Fully Accessible Future. The call for stories is very specifically asking for work set in a place where the ideas of Universal Design have been realized through the use of future tech. With the exception of asking writers to stay clear of some of the more depersonalizing tropes associated with disability in almost every genre—the “supercrip” who can overcome anything and the twisted, bitter arch-villain whose evil is either caused or signified by his disability—we are not proscribing anything about the characters, plot, or epoch of the story.
We are looking for well-crafted stories which don’t let this setting overwhelm the plot or the characters. Good writers pepper the details of the universe of their story throughout the work, revealing only what we need to know to understand why the characters do what they do, and what enabled them to do those things. We aren’t asking for stories that celebrate or minimize disability, even. We want visions of how future tech can create more fully inclusive communities, but we want to see that through the eyes of your characters—be they typically bodied or persons with disabilities. But, mostly, we want great stories. A piece which lays out a brilliant plan for using future tech to accommodate a wider variety of ways of being embodied would rock, but if that’s all it is—a blueprint, or an exercise in world building—it won’t win. Because this is, above all else, a writing contest.

So get writing!