Writing Popular Fiction Read online

  I arrived at the AC building and floated the car in for a Marine attendant to park. As I slid out and he slid in, I asked, "Know anything about the howler on Seventh? Turned on its side and driven halfway into a store. Lot of coppers."

  He was a huge man with a blocky head and flat features that looked almost painted on. When he wrinkled his face in disgust, it looked as if someone had put an egg-beater on his nose and whirled everything together. "Peace criers," he said.

  I couldn't see why he would bother lying to me, so I didn't go through the trouble of using my esp, which requires some expenditure of energy. "I thought they were finished," I said.

  "So did everyone else," he said. Quite obviously, he hated the peace criers, as did most men in uniform. "The Congressional investigating committee proved the voluntary army was still a good idea. We don't run the country like those creeps say we do. Brother, I can sure tell you we don't!" Then he slammed the door and took the car away to park it while I punched for the elevator, stepped through its open maw, and went up.

  I made faces at the cameras which watched me and repeated two dirty limericks on the way to the lobby.

  In the space of three hundred words, the hero reaches the AC building, managing to fill us in, as he goes, on more of the background of 2004 A.D. The wheeled vehicle seems to have been replaced by air-cushion craft. The social system is in turmoil, with rioters and heavy police patrols. A voluntary army seems to have been in effect for some time-giving rise to charges by the "peace criers" that it is somehow running the country. Background topics touched on thus far: social conditions, fashions, transportation, the state of scientific advancement.

  When the lift stopped and the doors opened, a second Marine greeted me, requested that I hold my fingertips to an identiplate to verify his visual check. I complied, was approved, and followed him to another elevator in the long bank. Again: up.

  Too many floors to count later, we stepped into a cream-walled corridor, paced almost to the end of it, and went through a chocolate door that slid aside at the officer's vocal command. Inside, there was a room of alabaster walls with hex signs painted every five feet in brilliant reds and oranges. A small and ugly child sat in a black leather chair, and four men stood behind him, staring at me as if I were expected to say something of monumental importance.

  I didn't say anything at all.

  The child looked up, his eyes and lips all but hidden by the wrinkles of a century of life, by gray and grave-like flesh. I tried to adjust my judgment, tried to visualize him as a grandfather. But it was not so. He was a child. There was the glint of babyhood close behind that ruined countenance. His voice cracked like papyrus unrolled for the first time in millenia, and he gripped the chair as the words came, and he squinted his already squinted eyes, and he said, "You're the one." It was an accusation. "You're the one they sent for."

  For the first time in many years, I was afraid. I was not certain what terrified me, but it was a deep and relentless uneasiness, far more threatening than The Fear which rose in me most nights when I considered my origins and the pocket of the plastic womb from which I came.

  "You," the child said again.

  "Who is he?" I asked the assembled military men.

  No one spoke immediately, as if they wanted to be sure the freak in the chair was finished.

  He wasn't.

  "I don't like you," he said. "You're going to be sorry you came here. I'm going to see to that."

  A bit of background is added, extrapolating on advancements in criminology with the "identiplate." By the end of the chapter, the hero has encountered the problem of the child/ancient who is apparently born of the Artificial Wombs and who intends him harm. Wondering what kind of harm, and whether the hero can escape it, lead the reader on.

  As the plot develops in chapter two, the reader learns that the Artificial Creation program is a military effort to develop human psionic weapons. Simeon, until this child/ ancient, was their only success, the others being merely normal or hideously mutated but all without esp. Though several hundred words of background are given on the Wombs and what they have done, it is parceled out through the entire chapter, as it was in chapter one, rather than delivered in one or two long expository paragraphs. This parceling-out is the key to a good science fiction background construction.

  At one time, writers differentiated story characters by labels, simple descriptive tags used for repeated character identification. The writer would blatantly label one woman a hussie, the next a "good" woman, this man a cold-blooded egoist, the next a man of humanitarian impulses. Thereafter, when reappearing, the characters were recalled to the reader by their labels. Editors and writers alike shun such simplistic "craftsmanship" these days. You are expected to develop your characters through their actions, by showing the reader instead of telling him.

  For example, if one of your story people engages in a fist fight, bests his opponent but continues to beat and kick him after he has won, we do not need to have the character labeled a sadist. He has shown us, by his actions, that he has ugly violent urges.

  If another character sits in a fancy restaurant, eating french fried potatoes with his fingers, belching, telling raucous jokes, his napkin balled beside his plate rather than smoothed over his lap or thigh, he is clearly somewhat of a mannerless lout. The writer does not have to directly label him as such.

  Likewise, it is no longer acceptable for a writer to differentiate his story people through the use of physical quirks or personality idiosyncrasies. A character with a scarred face and no other traits to separate him from his fellows is not a character at all, but a vague outline. A man identified continually through a habit-scratching his chin, pacing, always with a certain kind of drink, or by repeated use of the same phrase-is also a thin creation, ultimately unbelievable.

  This is not to say that physical quirks and idiosyncrasies are to be avoided. They work well in conjunction with carefully explained motivation and a well-rounded portrait of all aspects of a character's personality.

  A common mistake made by good, new category fiction writers is that in their science fiction stories they attempt to fully realize the human characters, but they construct the aliens out of cardboard, spit, and prayer. As I said before, the non-human members of your science fiction cast must be as believably motivated and as individualistic as any of their human counterparts, with but two exceptions: (1) when the alien is used as a comic foil or focus for satire or slapstick humor (and I've already warned against this approach), or (2) when the aliens never appear directly in the story, or appear only fleetingly, chiefly revealed as a sinister, unseen force (examples of this sort of story are Out of the Deeps by John Wyndham, which recounts a horrifying battle between mankind and unseen aliens who live beneath the seas, and The Shores of Another Sea by Chad Oliver, which describes a first contact between man and unseen alien as they try to conquer fear of each other and learn to accept each other's existence). Otherwise, your extra-terrestrials must be as realistic as you can make them.

  The reader can be made to feel the unhumanity of your aliens in several different ways. Most obvious, and the first technique you will use when introducing them, is their appearance, which will be either subtly or radically different from that of mankind. The more detailed you make their appearance, the more solid is your first step toward making them credible beings.

  In my own novel, Beastchild, which was voted one of the most popular science fiction novels of the decade in one poll and received a Hugo Award nomination in its year, I was especially conscious of creating a believable alien, for he was the hero of the story and had to capture the reader's interest and sympathy from the outset. Careful, thorough delineation of his race's physical and mental standards helped to make him real, as the following passages from the book should indicate.

  In his onyx-walled room in the occupation tower, Hulann had disassociated his overmind from his organic regulating brain. He removed it from all stimuli, including the cells of his memory
banks, where it could not even dream. He slept the perfect death-like sleep that only his kind, in all the myriad worlds of the galaxy, seemed to be able to achieve.

  The naoli? The lizard men? They're the ones who die every night, aren't they?

  To Hulann in his sleeping state, there was no sound whatsoever. No light. No images of color, no heat or cold. If there was a taste upon his long, thin tongue, his overmind could not know. Indeed all the stimuli were so censored that there was not even darkness. Darkness, after all, represented only nothingness.

  He could return to wakefulness in any one of three ways, though there was a decided order of preference among these methods. First, and most unpleasant, was his body's built-in danger alarm. If his regulating brain, the heavily convoluted organic portion of his mind, should discover something seriously amiss with his temporal shell, it would be able to contact and wake his overmind through a fail-safe system of seldom-used third-order nerve clusters. Such a contact would shock its own grey cortex, opening the nether-world pocket in which the ethereal overmind sleeps.

  (Pause here for an anecdote or two. In a thousand places across the stars, stories are told which concern the naoli and the seriousness with which alcoholic beverages affect their "danger alarm" waking system. These stories are told in barrooms in port cities, down in the basements of questionable buildings that lease their rooms to even more questionable businessmen, or in sweet-drug centers on better looking but no more honest streets. It seems that while sweet-drugs bring only euphoria to the naoli, alcohol transforms them into bobbling, bouncing, scaly-tailed clowns who-after half an hour of making total fools of themselves-collapse into their death-sleep. They stretch out stiff as ice right on the floor. In some less reputable establishments (which is to say most of these places) the other patrons make great sport out of carrying the unconscious lizard men to odd places like garbage bins and ladies' washrooms and letting them there to wake. This damages nothing but the naoli's ego. A far more nasty pastime among these same drunken buffoons is to see how far they must go to trigger the naoli's "danger alarm" system. But the alarm is stupefied by alcohol and does not work well. The stories you hear later are about naoli lying there with their webs sizzling, not even twitching in response. Or of a naoli with fifty pins stuck in its legs, sleeping peacefully while its heavy blood seeped out through its tough gray skin. Naoli do not often drink liquor. When they do, it is usually alone. They are not a stupid race.)

  Much less unpleasant but still not desirable, a naoli could come awake if the Phasersystem had something to tell him. That could, of course, be anything from urgent news to another spate of propaganda from the central committee. More often than not, it was the latter.

  Finally, and best of all, the overmind could awake of its own accord. Before retiring into the netherworld, the overmind could plant a suggestion with a time-trigger. Then, ten or eight, or fifteen or twenty hours later, it would click into consciousness with the clarity of a tri-dimensional screen being turned on.

  Here, the reader is confronted with an alien quality so fundamental that it becomes impossible for him to think of the hero, Hulann, as a fancily dressed human. If naoli and man are so different in the way they sleep and wake, how much more must they differ on complex questions? Also, with the key words and phrases like "lizard men," "scaly-tailed," "webs," and "tough gray skin," the unhuman appearance of the aliens is kept in the front of the reader's mind.

  Other physiological references abound:

  He snorted, opening his second set of nostrils now that he would need a full air supply for movement. When his lungs swelled and adjusted to the new air flow, he got out of bed.

  And:

  Hulann moved closer, raising the double .lids completely free of his huge, oval eyes.

  And this:

  Hulann winced. His double stomach burned on both levels with acidic agitation.

  Aside from their physical peculiarities, alien creatures will have habits and gestures that are unlike human habits and gestures. The naoli, for example, use sweet-drugs rather than alcohol, a substance with no effect on human beings. As for their gestures:

  He tucked his tail between his legs, wrapping it around his left thigh in the age-old reaction to danger, to the unknown, to that which made the scales of the scalp tighten and ache.

  A human being's reaction to fear might be a hunching of the shoulders, a stiffening of the back, balling of the fists. But the naoli are not human beings. Another gesture:

  [Hulann] passed the others without comment, noticing the odd looks he drew from them. Realizing that his lips were pulled in over his teeth, giving him a look of shame, he quickly rearranged his facial composure…

  When we say a man looks shamefaced, we certainly don't mean that he has his lips drawn in over his teeth!

  Having convincingly established the differences in appearance between the aliens and mankind, you must make continual application of these differences, elaborating on them, throughout the story. This can be done in any of three ways: (1) through the alien's relationships with his own kind, (2) through his contacts with men, (3) through his reactions to events in the story.

  Let's look, for example, at alien-to-alien interaction in Beastchild, one of many such scenes in the book, this one concerning naoli sexuality:

  She licked her lips with her tongue, then stuck more of it out and flicked at her chin. She was pretty. He did not understand how he had almost walked by without stopping.

  Certainly, a man would not be attracted to a woman whose tongue was so long she could lick her chin with it and did so, apparently, with some regularity. But naoli values of beauty will be different from those of a man. And, having established a naoli's sexuality, one must also expect it to be satisfied in a manner unlike human satisfaction:

  He watched her a moment longer, reluctant to leave. More than any other female he had seen in the last two hundred years, she made him want to make a verbal commitment. It would be a delight to go away with her, into the warren of his own house back on the home world, and fuse for sixteen days, living off the fat of their bodies and the ceremonial waters they would take with them.

  He could envision her in ecstasy.

  And when she came out of the warren, she would have the gaunt, fleshless look of a desirable woman who has mated for the standard fusing period.

  She would be gorgeous in the aura of her femininity.

  In a few simple paragraphs that don't interrupt the narrative flow, the reader gets a glimpse of another basic difference between men and naoli, as profound a difference as the way they sleep and wake.

  Through contact with men, the alien's unhuman qualities will also be driven home, as in the following exchange between Hulann and a human child, Leo, whom he has befriended against all the laws of his race which has been at war with ours for many years:

  "Doesn't that hurt?" Leo asked.

  "What?"

  "Your lips. When you pull them in over your teeth like that."

  Hulann quickly showed his teeth, put a hand to his lips and felt them. "No," he said. "We -have few nerves in our outer layers of flesh."

  "You look funny," Leo said. He drew his own lips in over his teeth and made talking motions, then burst out laughing.

  Hulann found himself laughing also, watching the boy mimic him. Did he really look like that? It was a mysterious expression on a naoli; or at least he had been raised to respect it as such. In this mock version, it truly was humorous.

  "What are you doing?" the boy squealed, laughing even harder.

  "What?" Hulann asked, looking about him. His body was still. His hands and feet did not move.

  "That noise," Leo said.

  "Noise?"

  "That wheezing sound."

  Hulann was perplexed. "Mirth," he said. "Laughter like yours."

  "It sounds like a drain that's clogged," Leo said. "Do I sound that bad to you?"

  Hulann began laughing again. "To me… you sound like some birds that we have on my world.
They are great, hairy things with three legs and tiny little bills."

  In other words, the writer must realize that the aliens will find human beings as strange as men find them.

  Finally, the writer must apply these alien peculiarities to plot developments. In the following example from Beast-child, while Hulann and Leo are fleeing pursuers by means of a cable car dangling above a snowy landscape in the midst of a storm, we see the naoli react in a very individual and different manner, based on his race's traits:

  Hulann's tail snapped, then wound around his left thigh, tight.

  "What's the matter?" the boy asked.

  "Nothing."

  "You look upset."

  Hulann grimaced, his reptillian features taking on a pained look. "We're awfully high," he said in a thin voice.

  "High? But it's only a hundred feet down!"

  Hulann looked mournfully at the cable sliding past above them. "A hundred feet is enough if that should break."

  "You've been in shuttlecraft without even a cable."

  "The highest they go is fifteen feet."

  "Your starships, then. You can't get any higher than that."

  "And you can't fall, either. There's no gravity out there."

  Leo was laughing now, bending over the waist-high safety bar and giggling deep down in his throat. When he looked up again, his small face was red, and his eyes were watery. "This is something else!" he said.