[转载]如何撰写畅销的奇幻作品(页 1) - 文学评论区 - 龙骑士城堡奇幻论坛奇幻文学,翻译,原创,龙与地下城

dzpday 发表于 2003-9-5 13:23

[转载]如何撰写畅销的奇幻作品

节录：如何撰写畅销的奇幻作品 　　自「魔戒」系列以降，史诗型奇幻总是高居畅销金榜榜首。你也想写一本吗？ 　　秘技在此！ 小说结构 1. 创造主要角色 大部份会读你书的人都是些没自信心的男人。所以，找个废渣当主角吧。生活茫然、害 羞、懦弱、自责、有病、懒惰、土气等等都是好个性。 2. 创造任务 你的废渣必需在毫无预警的情况下，突然被告知整个世界的命运（或另一个世界的命 运）完全掌握在他无能的手中。为了拯救世界，他必需去执行一些工作、对抗一些没听 过的敌人，习得什么秘拳等等。 3. 创造一堆龙蛇混杂的伙伴 废渣/英雄们必有三教九流的伙伴助阵。这些伙伴必需包括各种不同的人形种族：矮 人、精灵、扶轮社员等等。每个伙伴成员都需要有不同的特殊能力，像是使剑法、转绳 套等刚好符合故事需求的技能。 4. 创造一个博学但帮不上忙的向导 这位向导对任务相关事物可说是一清二楚，可是永远没办法述说完整。他有时也会有广 大无边的力量，但是永远不会在需要的时候使用。 (见第七节：长！长！长！） 5. 创造地理 冒险团第一件要作的事就是要进行超超长程的旅行，途中还得穿过各式各样的地形，经 历过各种各类的气候变化。奇幻世界中必需将所有能想到的地形（山脉、沙漠、沼泽、 冰河、森林等）随机安排在地表上，且无视现实中的地理和生态法则。 注：所有奇幻世界都是方形的。也就是书摊开来后左右两页合并的形状。 6. 创造敌人 每个奇幻世界里都有个坏心的敌人，一个强力的大反派，它老是在想摧毁这个地方；不 过没人知道这样作对它有什么好处。这个大反派还会拥有一支不需吃饭、不用支薪、也 无需补给的庞大军队，并且总能在没有后勤编制的状况下长征万里包围城市。虽然如 此，但他还是只会把一些没屁用的小东西作为他的主力，例如他的戒指或石头等等。 7. 长！长！长！ 史诗型奇幻小说的重点，就是要让读者读到头晕眼花、精疲力竭。读者在阅读本书时遭 受到的阻碍，绝对不能亚于英雄们进行任务时所遇到的困难。因此故事要尽可能地难以 阅读。作法如下： (1) 故事细节要描述到比详细还要详细。要描写旅程中每一天发生的大小事，他们走了 多远、吃了什么、睡在哪里；在没发生事情的日子中还要描写得特别详细。 (2) 进行到重要剧情场景时，要记得加入冗长的内心戏。当英雄在紧要关头之时，每一 分钟都要审视自己的知觉、感受、自我意识、出门是不是忘了关瓦斯诸如此类。 (3) 不要让事件被轻易解决。举例来说，如果法师向导身怀绝地武艺，也不会用以解决 困境。如下所述： ╳错 面目可憎的罗尔转过头来，举起黑杖开始猛击。 「快用魔石！」史蒂芬大叫。 「别担心，」只见国师高帝安将宝珠高高举起，嘴里喃喃念着阿尼密文：「哈塔威士塔 ！」四周闪过一阵强光，魔王砰地一声化为一滩绿泥。 ○对 面目可憎的罗尔转过头来，举起黑杖开始猛击。 「快用魔石！」史蒂芬大叫。 「不行，」法师意味深长地说着：「如果我们使用了魔石力量来伤害人，只会更加助长 邪恶的力量。」 黑杖击下，矮人金哩顿时被劈成两半。 要是国王和法师可以使用他们的魔法力量，那他们就不需要废渣/英雄们来拯救他们， 这个故事在一百页内就会结束了。因此，虽然法师可以让大树起死回生、或召唤天地万 物之精，但他们只准使用智能来打败小啰啰。 于此同时，你还要想尽办法作到下列几件事： 8. 跳过难写的部分 撇去拖时间的需要不谈，某些故事元素是实在是太难写了。八千里路的旅行很漫长，但 很容易掰。战争相对地就很棘手，因为它牵扯到的事物太多，而且你可能还得懂得一些 战略常识。所以如果你真的安排了战争场景，就让主角直接受伤昏迷好了。例如： 「...头上轰地一声，眼前突然浮起一阵迷雾，他感觉到自己跌入了黑暗之中。还在空 中挥舞的剑剎时像被困住、停住了。他眼睛缓缓闭上，战斗的声响顿时离得老远；在黑 云攫住他之前，他隐约听到绿丘上有人喊着：「土司族入侵！土司族入侵！」 到此结束。下一幕我们的英雄就在医疗室里的白石膏床上醒来，清纯女战士（见后面 「角色」一节）告诉他，战役已经结束，而且你猜怎么着？他们赢了。你节省了五十页 描述那些复杂军事细节的工夫。 其它难写的情节还包括了没人能越过的山脉等，请参考后述「洞穴」一节。 9. 最后一定要来个大决战 虽然大魔王拥有强大的魔力，但是他总是会试着采用良好的古老传统：与好人们面对面 格斗。无论一个法师、国王或皇后具有多强的魔法力量，他们最后一定要拿剑在战场上 挥砍冲锋。 10. 尽可能宰掉所有人 只有在万事都输到脱裤的最后最后最后一刻时，废渣/英雄们才会达到目标、获得力 量、发现密语或完成任务。而在这条路上，你还必须让他摔倒扭伤、经历一场自我认知 的心理危机、被人迷惑等等。他的大多数伙伴还必需死得很痛苦，并且要在这个废渣/ 英雄赶到前就倒下。这会让我们对大魔王感到愤怒，虽然根本就只是因为这个废渣/英 雄太慢又无能。 好了，接下来看看其它的重点。 反派消耗品 你需要制造一些消耗用的反派角色。例如半兽人、哥布尔、地精、食人妖、巨魔、龙、 干尸以及其它可以让我们随意砍个成千上万只的生物。他们通常肤色黝黑，毛茸茸、浑 身汗臭，或具有中产阶级白人所无法接受的一切特征。他们通常面目丑恶，这是基于传 统人们迷信相由心生、面恶心恶。这也是我们对那些残废孤疾者应尽的一份义务：提醒 读者们，人丑就是坏到罪该万死。 注意：在奇幻世界里，改过自新重新作人的概念并不存在。所有魔王的盟友、手下、奴 仆、傀儡都要被清除地一干二净，就算他们是被迫的也一样。（译注：除非你要为续集 留伏笔。） 顽强的老战士 所有奇幻小说里都一定要安排一个菁英弟兄，他训练有素、绝对愚忠，而且出身自战士 家族，其它特性还包括刚毅、阴沉、满身伤疤、缺了只眼睛、少了只胳臂等等。通常他 们身上的伤痕越多，就代表他们的武艺越高强；这点倒是跟现实生活完全相反。 清纯女战士 生活里废渣要不就是有异性恐惧症，要不就是过于依赖女人；所以奇幻小说里的女性总 是强大又纯洁。跟这些清纯女战士相比，圣女贞德简直跟潘金莲相去不远。她扪强壮、 高贵、忠诚、勇敢、教养良好、而且总会在最后挂掉──不然我们还能拿她们怎么办？ 跟她们结婚太可怕了，而且从没有人在史诗型奇幻小说里作爱。 正确的体型分类 瘦皮猴一定机灵又狡猾，壮得像熊的大个子一定是蠢汉。 角色的名字 要帮角色取名字很简单，只要把一些无意义的音节凑在一起，让它听起来像个外国名字 就好了。要是这个名字念不出来，那就更像真的了。字母「Y」、「H」和上标号「'」 可添加异国风味，如「Dn'a'brht」、「Ynhazzmhn」、「Jbreheh'm"」都是很适合的名 字。 把一些英语中少见的名字随机组在一起也不错，像是「Rusk Montana」、「Heron Alini」或「Ermine Dayglo」等等。 科技 奇幻世界里的科技总是有着不可思议的落差。他们被年长贤者所组成的议会统治着，这 些贤者守护并发展了数千年的知识，却没办法发明出任何能帮助对抗干尸与兽人的事物 ──例如点四四的Magnum枪。很多奇幻世界里的铁工艺和文字都很优秀，可以造出十字 弓、攻城车和复杂的机关门，却找不到具有轮子的交通工具。 注意：奇幻世界里永远没有劳动型的经济体系。很少很少人工作，也欠缺农业；通常没 人知道食物打哪儿来。 魔法 当法师互相用火球或闪电攻击时，好人法师用的一定是蓝色，坏人则永远是绿色或红 色。 居所 奇幻小说里主要的居住场所有三种：洞穴、小屋和城堡。 洞穴是奇幻作家最好的朋友。它们可以用作藏宝之所在、学问之中心，以及怪物雌伏的 地盘。洞穴的描写不用太多，还可以掺在一起作成迷宫。以好莱坞为例，里头所有的洞 穴地板都平凡无奇。 洞穴的另一个用处，就在于你发现自己因为创造了无法克服的地理障碍（例如没人能越 过的山脉），而将自己逼入剧情死角时。让冒险团改从地下穿过就是个简单的解决方 式。当他们漫无天日地在隧道中摸索好几天后，会发现自己奇迹般地通过那道没人能越 过的山脉。作者也可以省下五十页的细节描述。 小屋总是座落在穷乡僻壤，人迹罕至之地。里头住的人一定纯朴又善良。(译注：刚好 可以接待迷路或冒险中的主角。 城堡总是「由天然岩石中凿切而成」──别管这是什么意思。城堡中的房间必是四壁萧 条、无甚摆饰。 魔王要塞 废渣/英雄们最后一定要粉碎敌人的老巢。这向来不难，因为要塞里的哨所从来不发警 讯；就算有重兵驻守，废渣/英雄在离城廿呎外的地方都不会被侦测到。 警卫最森严的城堡也总会留扇无人看守的小侧门，好让人出去倒垃圾。一但进入城堡， 就只会偶尔遇见一小撮人巡逻走过。废渣/英雄们总能直捣敌军中心而没人发现。 注：魔王的致命弱点永远是过于自信。 　　 言尽于此。 　　 赶快拿起笔来，开始你史诗奇幻作者的生涯吧。 from:路西法地狱 <a href='http://www.lucifer.hoolan.org/' target='_blank'>http://www.lucifer.hoolan.org/</a>

暗之水晶 发表于 2003-9-5 15:37

最重要的一点，也是最废话的一点，要有超人的耐心

努塔瑞 发表于 2003-9-6 16:57

火星丫

花郎发表于 2003-9-6 17:38

我记得上半年。。或则去年就在恶搞区发过了。。。。

星之行者 发表于 2003-9-6 17:57

看来火星大冲的影响还是比较强的。

vicia 发表于 2003-9-7 10:21

<img src='http://vampire.l18.bizcn.com/bbs_en/html/emoticons/laugh.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='laugh.gif'> 呀呀……火星呀火星……偶很早很早很早以前就看见过了……

pusher 发表于 2003-9-7 14:25

To my sister Janice, Who taught me how to read, Which was the beginning of wisdom, And how to be charitable, Which is wisdom's end. About the Author No one had ever won both the Hugo and the Nebula Award for best science fiction novel two years in a row-until 1987, when Speaker for the Dead won the same awards given to Ender's Game. But Orson Scott Card's experience is not limited to one genre or form of storytelling. A dozen of his plays have been produced in regional theatre; his historical novel, Saints (alias Women of Destiny) has been an underground hit for several years; and Card has written hundreds of audio plays and a dozen scripts for animated videoplays for the family market. He has also edited books, magazines, and anthologies; he writes a regular review column for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; he publishes Short Form, a journal of short-fiction criticism; he even reviews computer games for Compute! Along the way, Card earned a master's degree in literature and has an abiding love for Chaucer, Shakespeare, Boccaccio, and the Medieval Romance. He has taught writing courses at several universities and at such workshops as Antioch, Clarion, Clarion West, and the Cape Cod Writers Workshop. It is fair to say that Orson Scott Card has examined storytelling from every angle. Born in Richland, Washington, Card grew up in California, Arizona, and Utah. He lived in Brazil for two years as an unpaid missionary for the Mormon Church and received degrees from Brigham Young University and the University of Utah. He currently lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his wife, Kristine, and their three children, Geoffrey, Emily, and Charles (named for Chaucer, Bronte, and Dickens). Introduction A writer never knows who's going to be reading his book, but I've made a few assumptions about you, anyway. I figure that you're probably not yet an established writer in the genre of speculative fiction, or you wouldn't feel a need to read a book on how to write it. Still, you have a genuine interest in writing science fiction and fantasy, not because you have some notion that it's somehow "easier" to make a buck in this field (if that's your delusion, give it up at once!), but rather because you believe that the kind of story you want to tell might be best received by the science fiction and fantasy audience. I hope you're right, because in many ways this is the best audience in the world to write for. They're open-minded and intelligent. They want to think as well as feel, understand as well as dream. Above all, they want to be led into places that no one has ever visited before. It's a privilege to tell stories to these readers, and an honor when they applaud the tales you tell. What I can't do in a book this brief is tell you everything you need to know about writing fiction. What I can do is tell you everything I know about how to write speculative fiction in particular. I've written a whole book on characterization and point of view, so I hardly need to cover that same material here; nor will I attempt to teach you plotting or style, dialogue or marketing or copyright law or any of the other things that writers of every kind of fiction have to know something about. But I can attempt to tell you the things that only the writers of speculative fiction need to worry about: world creation, alien societies, the rules of magic, rigorous extrapolation of possible futures - tasks that don't come up in your average mystery or romance or literary tale. To do that, I've divided this book into five chapters of varying length. Chapter I deals with the boundaries of speculative fiction; it's an essay on what science fiction and fantasy are, so that you can get an idea of the range of possibilities and educate yourself with the literature that has gone before. Chapter II, the longest, begins the practical, hands-on work of world creation, perhaps the most vital step in creating a good speculative story. Chapter III deals with the structuring of a science fiction or fantasy tale-how you go about turning your world into a story, or making your story work well within its world. With Chapter IV, we go through the actual writing process, dealing with the problems of exposition and language that only speculative fiction writers face. The first part of Chapter V deals with the practical business of selling science fiction and fantasy-though you'd better check the copyright date on this edition of the book before acting on my advice, since this is the section most likely to become outdated. And also in Chapter V we get a little personal and I offer you some advice on how to live successfully as a science fiction or fantasy writer. Not that I know how you should live your life-but I have made some really first-rate mistakes in my time, and have seen others make some doozies, too, and if by forewarning you I can forewarn you, I think it's worth the effort. 1. The Infinite Boundary It was 1975. I was twenty-four years old. The naive ambitions of youth were beginning to be tempered by reality. I had written a couple of dozen plays and more than half of them had been produced in college or community theatres-for a total remuneration of about $300. At that rate, I figured, I had only to write sixteen full-length plays a week to make $10,000 a year-hardly major money, even then. And I was fast, but not that fast. Furthermore, the non-profit theatre company I had started was tumbling toward bankruptcy with all its debts looming over me. My day job as an editor with a university press didn't pay me enough to live on, let alone pay what the company owed. The only thing I knew how to do that had any hope of bringing in extra money was writing- and it was plain that I'd have to find something to write besides plays. I had dabbled in science fiction for years, reading quite a bit of it, even trying my hand at a few stories. For a while in my late teens I had even worked on a cycle of stories tracing the development of a family with peculiar psychic abilities as they worked out their genetic destiny on a colony planet. Now, with new enthusiasm-or was it desperation?-I dusted off the best of them, one that had once earned a nice note from an editor, and proceeded to rewrite it from beginning to end. It was the tale of a wandering tinker who had a psionic gift that manifested itself in two ways: He could communicate with birds, and he could heal the sick. When he returned to his hometown, Worthing, a medievil village deep in the Forest of Waters, he came into conflict with the villagers over their treatment of his birds; eventually he was blamed for an epidemic that carried off many villagers during a devastating winter storm, and they killed him. In short, it was the sort of perky, cheerful little tale that I've been writing ever since. As I rewrote "Tinker," I was delighted to see how terrible the earlier version had been. After all, if I could see, at twenty-four, how bad the story was that looked so brilliant to me at nineteen, it must mean I had learned something in the intervening years. So it was with high hopes that I typed the new draft, tucked it into an envelope and mailed it away to Analog magazine. Why Analog? Because in those days it was the only science fiction magazine that was listed in Writer's Market. I had never actually read an issue of the magazine. Still, my story was science fiction, and Analog was a science fiction magazine. What could be more logical? The story came back in due course, rejected. But there was something in the accompanying letter to encourage me. Ben Bova, then editor of Analog, told me that he liked the way I wrote and hoped to see more stories from me. So why was he rejecting "Tinker"? Because it wasn't science fiction. "Analog publishes only science fiction," said Ben, so of course a fantasy like "Tinker" simply wouldn't do. I was outraged-at first. "Tinker" had psionic powers, a colony planet, a far future time period-if that wasn't science fiction, what was? Until I looked again at the story the way Ben Bova must have seen it. He knew nothing about the other stories in the cycle. "Tinker" included no mention of its taking place on a world being colonized by human beings, and there was nothing alien about the landscape. It could have been an English village in about 950 A.D. As for John Tinker's psionic powers, there was nothing in the story to suggest they weren't magical powers. There was nothing to suggest they were, either, of course-he chanted no spells, rubbed no talisman, prayed to no pagan deity. But in the absence of other evidence, the landscape clearly marked "Tinker" as fantasy. It was all those trees in the Forest of Waters. A rustic setting always suggests fantasy; to suggest science fiction, you need sheet metal and plastic. You need rivets. The buildings in "Tinker" didn't even use nails! I had discovered the first kind of boundary that marks the twin genres of fantasy and science fiction: the publishing category. Boundary 1: A Publishing Category When fiction publishers send out books through the distributors and on to the bookstores, they have few ways of influencing the way those books are displayed and handled. Naturally, every publisher would like to see all his novels displayed face out on the shelves, preferably in a section labeled "New and Brilliant." But in the real world, this is not going to happen. Instead, most novels will be crammed spine out into the store's precious shelf space, with only the alphabetical accident of the author's last name deciding where on the shelf the books will be placed. Having to browse through a thousand spine-out volumes grouped by the last names of authors he's never heard of would be quite inconvenient for the novelbuyer, of course. Fortunately, fiction publishers learned something from the nonfiction side of the business, which groups books by super-subjects, or categories. How to Cross-Stitch is grouped with Plumbing Made Easy under "How-to Books." Biographies are grouped by the last name of the subject rather than the author; history is roughly grouped by region and time period. New categories spring up as needed in 1975, there was no bookstore section labeled "Computers." Why not group fiction in a similar way? Micro-subjects wouldn't do it, wouldn't be practical to have sections called "Dog Stories," "Horse Stories," "Mid-life Crisis and Adultery," "Writers and Artists Struggling to Discover Themselves," "People in Past Eras Who Think and Talk Just Like Modern Americans," and "Reminiscences of Childhoods in Which Nothing Happened," even though these are all fairly popular themes for fiction. But there were some broad categories that were quite useful, like "Science Fiction," "Fantasy," "Historicals", "Romances," "Mysteries," and "Westerns." Anything that didn't fit into the categories was lumped together under the heading "Fiction." Publishers could slap these labels on their books and know that bookstore owners-who couldn't possibly be familiar with, let alone read, every work by every author-would know how to group these books within the store so that readers could find them more easily. For many years, the appetite of science fiction readers far outstripped the production of science fiction writers and publishers. About 30,000 or 40,000 readers were so hungry for another sf novel that they'd buy anything, however bad it might be, as long as it had a rocket on the cover. As a result, while science fiction never sold very much, it did sell a certain guaranteed minimum. You couldn't lose money publishing it, almost regardless of quality. As a result, the publishing category was able to nurture many young, talented, but utterly inept writers as they served their apprenticeships and eventually learned how to write. Unlike the literary genre, where first novels often sell in the hundreds rather than the thousands, promising but clumsy sf writers could live on the advances and royalties from sales of 40,000 books. And a surprising number of us whose inept first novels exposed more of our weaknesses than our strengths eventually learned how to turn in work that had polish-and, sometimes, depth. Those days have passed, however. The ceiling has come off the genre, with hardcovers by Herbert, McCaffrey, Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, and Douglas Adams all having hit the best-seller lists in the 1970s and 1980s. But the floor has also dropped out of the genre. As soon as there were big bucks to be made in science fiction and fantasy, publishers began to bring out more and more novels, until it was impossible for anyone to read half of them, let alone all. Instead of 40,000 readers buying one copy of everything, there were hundreds of thousands of readers buying copies of maybe half the books, and some books that almost nobody read. The fantasy genre followed the same track with book publishing-only it was compressed into a much shorter time. With the word-of-mouth success of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit, the fantasy genre was born in the late sixties. Only a few years later, Ballantine published Terry Brooks's Sword of Shannara and hit the best-seller lists. At once fantasy was as big a business as science fiction was becoming. The appetite for new writers in the field of speculative fiction (science fiction and fantasy) is still enormous. If you write competently and if your story has any spark of life, you will sell it. And, while you no longer have the guarantee that even your weakest early work will be read and remembered, that can also be a blessing: I'm certainly glad that my first novel isn't trotted out and displayed wherever I go. New writers are, if anything, even more welcome in the magazines. Here, too, the publishing categories matter. While the two most prestigious magazines, Issiac Asirnov's Science Fiction Magazine (hereafter called Asimov's) and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (Fe&SF), will occasionally publish rustic fantasies, all the magazines prefer science fiction with rivets and plastic. And not because that is necessarily the editors' taste, but because that's what the majority of the magazine-buying audience wants most and rewards best, with sales, with favorable letters of comment, and with Nebula and Hugo awards. The other two major magazines, Omni (which pays billions of dollars but buys only two stories an issue) and Analog, won't even consider rustic fantasy, though Omni will occasionally buy a contemporary or urban fantasy-the kind of story where something magical is happening in a familiar high-tech environment. All these magazines pride themselves on publishing stories from new writers. What doesn't get told quite as often is that they survive by discovering new writers. There's a cycle in science fiction that most writers follow. They break into the field by selling short stories and novelettes to the magazines until their names and styles become familiar to book editors. Then they sign a few book contracts, get some novels under their belts, and suddenly they don't have time for those $400 stories anymore. The magazines that nurtured them and gave them their starts watch as the novels flow and the short fiction trickles in. So the magazines are forced to search constantly for new talent. This is even more true with the newer and smaller markets. Aboriginal SF and Amazing Stories-the newest and oldest magazines in the field have much smaller impact on the field, in part because the strongest writers are generally selling to Omni, Asimov's, and F&SF. But because of that, Abo and Amazing are that much more open to newcomers. In practical terms, you'll have a better chance selling to the magazines if your story is (1) short and (2) science fiction rather than fantasy. My career followed that track; so did the careers of most other science fiction writers in the field. Only fantasy writers are virtually forced to begin selling at novel length because the market is so much smaller for fantasy. Boundary 2: A Community of Readers and Writers It's important to remember that there was a time when every one of today's publishing categories was part of the mainstream of fiction. When Gone with the Wind was published it was simply a novel, not a "historical" or a "romance"-though it would almost certainly be categorized that way today. And back when H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, A. Merritt, H. Rider Haggard, and others were inventing the genre of science fiction, their novels were published and displayed right alongside contemporaries like James, Dreiser, Woolf, and Conrad. Yet there was a clear difference even in the early 1900s between incipient science fiction, fantasy, and all the rest of literature. It was hard to put it into words then. H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and The Invisible Man were wildly different from each other, yet alike in the sense that they dealt with advances in science; hence he called these novels "scientific romances." This surely made them similar to the works of Jules Verne, who also dealt with scientific advances in novels like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. But Verne never seemed to see danger or a dark side in advancing technology, and in the long run his novels were never so much about the science as about the sights and wonders to be found in strange, inaccessible places. Twenty Thousand Leagues wasn't about Nemo's submarine as much as it was about the marvelous sights to be seen from its portholes. Journey to the Center of the Earth was about survival in a strange, hostile environment, and included such delightful nonsense as the ruins of ancient Atlantis and dinosaurs that had survived deep in the bowels of the Earth. Wells was much more serious and logical than Verne in his extrapolation of the possible results of scientific advances. And yet their stories sometimes had quite similar structures. For instance, while Around the World in Eighty Days dealt entirely with the sights and wonders of Verne's contemporary world, its ending absolutely hinges on knowledge of a scientific fact-that by traveling toward the east, the hero gained a day when he crossed the International Date Line. This is very much the same sort of structural game Wells played when he had the invaders from Mars in The War of the Worlds defeated by the common cold. Great events are changed by the most humble of facts-and yet when the reader reaches the surprise resolution, his faith in the order of the universe is restored. Humble little facts will save us in the end. A. Merritt's Face in the Abyss and H. Rider Haggard's She had even less in common with Wells than Verne did. Both these novels have a traveler find himself in a land long forgotten by modern man. In She, a magnificent woman has found a way to live forever, at the cost of the blood of her subjects; in The Face in the Abyss, lizard men descended from the dinosaurs keep a race of humans in thrall for their obscene sports and pleasures. There is more of magic than science in both of these books, yet There is a strong overlap of the readers who loved Wells, those who loved Verne, and those who loved Merritt and Haggard. Indeed, when Hugo Gernsback founded the first magazine devoted entirely to science fiction, Amazing Stories, back in the late twenties, he announced that he wanted to publish scientific romances like those of H.G. Wells; yet it is fair to say that, instead of the serious, rigorous scientific extrapolation found in Wells's work, Gernsback's magazine-and the others that soon imitated it-published stories that had far more of Verne's love of machines or of Merritt's and Haggard's romps into strange and dangerous places than of Wells's more serious treatment of science and the future. It wasn't until the mid-thirties, when John W. Campbell became editor of Astounding (now Analog, that Wellsian science fiction came to the fore in the American magazines. Rigorous extrapolation, a gosh-wow love of gadgets, and mystical adventures in strange and mysterious places; every major stream in speculative fiction today can be traced back to authors who were writing before the publishing categories existed. From among the readers in the twenties and thirties who loved any or all of these authors arose the first generation of "science fiction writers," who knew themselves to be continuing in a trail that had been blazed by giants. Gernsback's publishing category of science fiction was a recognition of a community that already existed; once it was named, once it became self-conscious, that community blossomed and cast many seeds, giving rise to each new generation that repeats, revises, or reinvents the same literary tradition. The boundaries that once were fluid now are much more firm, because the publishing category reinforces the identity of the community of readers and writers. Hilton felt no qualms about writing a lost-land novel, Lost Horizon; it troubled no one that it didn't belong in the same category as, say, his novel Good-bye, Mr. Chips. And so many readers responded to the book that the name of the lost land, Shangri-la, passed into the common language. Today, though, an author who wrote a fantasy like Lost Horizon would immediately be placed into the fantasy category, and if he then wrote a Good-bye, Mr. Chips, American publishers would be at a loss as to where to place it. How could you call it fantasy? Yet if you publish it out of the fantasy category, the readers who lilted the author's earlier books won't ever find it, and the readers who do browse the "Fiction" category won't ever have heard of this author and will probably pass the novel by. As a result there will be enormous pressure on the author to write "more books like that Shangri-la book." (Indeed, he will be pressed to write a whole series, which will be promoted as "The Shangri-la Trilogy" until a fourth book is published, then as "The Shangri-la Saga" until the author is dead. It happened to Frank Herbert with his Dune books, and despite her best efforts it is happening to Anne McCaffrey with her dragon books. Only a few, like Marion Zimmer Bradley, manage to break out of such channels and take a sizeable audience with them. Yet my experience as a reader is that the category boundaries mean very little. There have been months, even years of my life when all I really wanted to read was science fiction; but I felt no shame or guilt, no enormous mental stretch when at other times I read historicals or mysteries, classics, poetry, or contemporary best sellers. At present my pleasure reading is history and biography, but that will certainly change again. And even at the height of a science fiction reading binge, nothing can stop me from devouring the latest John Hersey or William Goldman or Robert Parker novel. The result is that today, while readers are very free, passing easily from one community to another, the publishing categories clamp down like a vise on the authors themselves. You must keep this in mind as you begin to publish. Do you wish to be forever known as a science fiction or fantasy writer? Some writers whose careers have been largely based on science fiction writing have never been categorized that way. Kurt Vonnegut, for instance, stoutly resisted any claim that what he wrote was science fiction-though there is no definition of science fiction that does not include his novels within the genre except that the words science fiction have never been printed on his books. John Hersey, as another example, has written such science fiction masterpieces as White Lotus, The Child Buyer, and My Petition for More Space; yet because he wrote other kinds of fiction first, he has never been locked into one category. ("Couldn't you, like, put some aliens into this book, Mr. Hersey? I'm not sure your audience will know what to make of this historical set in China of all places.") Vonnegut and Hersey were never within the science fiction ghetto. A few rare writers like Bradbury and LeGuin have transcended the boundaries without compromising the elements of fantasy within their work. But most of us find that the better we do as speculative fiction writers, the less interested publishers are in our non-sf, non-fantasy writing. Boundary 3: What SF Writers Write Is SF One surprising result of the ghettoizing of speculative fiction, however, is that writers have enormous freedom within its walls. It's as if, having once confined us within our cage, the keepers of the zoo of literature don't much care what we do as long as we stay behind bars. What we've done is make the categories of science fiction and fantasy larger, freer, and more inclusive than any other genre of contemporary literature. We have room for everybody, and we are extraordinarily open to genuine experimentation. Admittedly, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine regularly receives letters that ask, "In what sense is this story by Kim Stanley Robinson or Karen joy Fowler a science fiction or fantasy story? Why isn't it appearing in Atlantic where it belongs?" Some readers complain; indeed, some fairly howl at what writers do under the rubric of sf and fantasy. Yet the reason these stories don't appear in Atlantic or Harper's or The New Yorker is that even though they aren't really science fiction or fantasy in the publishing-category sense or the community sense (there are neither rivets nor trees, neither science nor magic, and they certainly aren't what readers were consciously looking for) their stories are nevertheless strange, in ways that editors outside the field of sf and fantasy find quite threatening. There is no particular reason why Karen joy Fowler's "Tonto at 40" (published as "The Faithful Companion at 40" to avoid a lawsuit from the Lone Ranger people, who have no sense of fun) shouldn't have appeared in a literary magazine. But the story was too experimental, too odd in ways that felt dangerous or confusing to editors who are used to seeing only the "experiments" that follow the latest trend. Only within speculative fiction was there room for Fowler's work. It has happened again and again, until it seems that there must be more room inside the ghetto walls than outside them. Even writers like Bruce Sterling and Lew Shiner, who have complained about the boneheadedness and unoriginality of most speculative fiction, discover that, despite the science fiction community's enormous appetite for stories with very bad thinking and worse writing, it remains the community most willing to sample something new. Sample-not necessarily embrace. It is not experimental but traditional work that wins Hugo and Nebula awards within the field. What matters is that truly unfamiliar and untraditional work is published at all, first in the magazines, and, once the work has become somewhat familiar there, eventually in books. In the long run, then, whatever is published within the field of science fiction and fantasy is science fiction and fantasy, and if it doesn't resemble what science fiction and fantasy were twenty years ago or even five years ago, some readers and writers will howl, but others will hear the new voice and see the new vision with delight. Once, frustrated with the plethora of meaningless definitions of science fiction, Damon Knight said, "Science fiction is what I point at when I say science fiction." That may sound like a decision not to define the field at all-but it is, in fact, the only completely accurate definition. The operative word in Damon Knight's definition is 1. That is, if Damon Knight, a writer, critic, and editor of known credentials, says that a work is science fiction, then it is. When it comes to known science fiction writers, that power is almost absolute. Because I've been around long enough, if I write a book and decide to call it fantasy or science fiction, then it is; even if others argue with me, it will still be counted as part of my science fiction/fantasy oeuvre. If you doubt me, read Gene Wolfe's novel Free Live Free. He swears it's science fiction. There are even shreds of evidence within the novel that it might be so. That's enough for him, and so it is enough for us. Editors and critics have the power to dub other people's work as well. If the editor at Asimov's, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Analog, Aboriginal SF, or Omni buys and publishes a story as fantasy or science fiction, then that writer's identity as an author of fantasy or science fiction is fairly launched. Book publishers have similar authority. Patricia Geary was more than a little surprised to wake up one day and discover that her novels, including the brilliant Strange Toys, had been published by Bantam in the science fiction/fantasy category. The thought that she was writing within a "category" never entered her mind. But she quickly learned that whether she sought the label or not, the speculative fiction audience was open to her stories in a way that her intended "literary" audience was not. Like the stable in C. S. Lewis's last Narnia book, The Last Battle, the science fiction ghetto is much larger on the inside than it is on the outside. You think as you enter it that you'll be cramped and confined; but I can tell you that for many of you it is only inside the sf community that you will find room enough to write all that you want to write and still find an audience for it. Still, all this talk of freedom is pretty irrelevant to you. Why? Because unless you are already established as a science fiction or fantasy writer, you do not have the power to decide unilaterally that your work belongs in the category. You must persuade at least one editor that your novel or story is science fiction or fantasy-and with rare exceptions, editors have a finely discriminating eye. You see, while the marketing department at a publishing house may think that a spaceship on the cover is enough to make a book sci-fi, the editorial department knows better. Your story has to feel like science fiction or fantasy to the editor or it won't get published, and then you won't have access to the great freedom that speculative fiction writers get after they've become established in the field. So you need some sort of definition of speculative fiction that lets you know how to satisfy enough of the expectations of the genre so that editors will agree that your work belongs in the category. Let's take for granted at this point that your skills and innate genius make your stories publishable. You still need to make sure your story warrants being published as science fiction or fantasy. The most complete definition will come to you only one way, and it isn't easy. You have to know everything ever published as speculative fiction or fantasy. Of course, you want to begin writing sf and fantasy before you die, so you know that you can't read every single book or story. You'll have to read a representative sample to get a feel for what has already been done in the field. What makes this complicated is that the genres of science fiction and fantasy include not only what speculative fiction writers are writing now, but also everything they have ever written. This is because the entire history of speculative fiction as a self-conscious genre spans a single lifetime. Jack Williamson, for instance, was writing in the 1930s, when the adventure tradition of Merritt and Haggard and the gosh-wow science of Verne predominated. He is still writing today, producing work that is taken seriously by the most modern and sophisticated of speculative fiction readers. Fiction from every period of speculative fiction is still in print, not because it is required reading in college and high school English classesthankfully it isn't-but because the community of speculative fiction readers keeps it alive. Go into the sf/fantasy section of your bookstore and you'll find both recent works and early, seminal books by living authors like Aldiss, Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Ellison, LeGuin, and Norton. In the same section you'll find books by late great writers like Alfred Bester, James Blish, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Heinlein, Robert Howard, E. E. "Doc" Smith, and J. R. R. Tolkien. You'll also find relatively young writers like Larry Niven, Anne McCaffrey, Jack Chalker, C. J. Cherryh, David Drake, Octavia Butler, and Roger Zelazny. And there'll be books by writers so new they have only a handful of titles in print, like Charles de Lint, William Gibson, Lisa Goldstein, James Patrick Kelly, Megan Lindholm, Pat Murphy, Pamela Sargent, and Bruce Sterling. In fact, that's not a bad reading list, though it's far from complete. Even if you've already read quite a bit of science fiction, if any of those names sound unfamiliar to you then you need to do some homework. Pick several names from each group, buy a couple of inexpensive paperbacks by each author you choose, and read. You'll begin to get a sense of the breadth and depth of this field you're planning to write in. Some of the books you won't care for a bit. Some you'll admire. Some you'll love. Some will transform you. Still, all that reading can take months. Though you'll have to do it eventually, you can start your education as a science fiction reader more modestly. Get a good overview of the field -I suggest David Hartwell's book Age of Wonder: Exploring the World of Science Fiction or James Gunn's Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction. Then get your hands on these great anthologies: The Science Fiction Hall of Fame (ed. Silverberg, Bova), Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions (ed. Ellison), and The Best of the Nebulas (ed. Bova). Finally, subscribe to Asimov's and F&SF and read them from cover to cover every month; you should also sample Analog, Aboriginal SF, Omni, and Amazing Stories. The Science Fiction Hall of Fame is an anthology of the short stories, novelettes, and novellas voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America As The best ever publishedx up to 1966, the year that the SFWA was organized. There is no better collection of classic short science fiction from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Dangerous Visions and its sequel, Again, Dangerous Visions, were meant by editor Harlan Ellison to be anthologies of work considered too dangerous to appear in the magazines. However, before Again, Dangerous Visions came out, the magazines themselves had been transformed enough that the stories didn't seem so dangerous anymore. It doesn't matter they are an excellent snapshot of most of the best writers producing innovative short fiction during the sixties and early seventies, most of whom are still major figures in the field today. The Best of the Nebulas is an anthology of the Nebula-winning short stories, novelettes, and novellas published between 1966 and 1988 that were voted best by the members of the SFWA in the late 1980s. And the current issues of the magazines will show you what is happening right this minute in the field of speculative fiction. Read all this and you'll have a very good sense, not only of what science fiction (and to a lesser degree fantasy) has been and is becoming, but also of what sort of science fiction you are drawn to. You may discover that your taste in science fiction is quite old-fashioned-that you don't like most of the stories in the Ellison anthologies, but love many in the Hall of Fame. No problem-those "old-fashioned" stories are still very much in demand, both in the magazines and at book length. Or you may be interested only in the hottest, most innovative entries in the current issues of the magazines. Fine-there's always room for more. Or you may realize that nobody is doing anything you really care for, and your fiction is going to stand the whole field on its ear. That, too, is perfectly acceptableyou don't have to imitate anybody; it's usually better if you don't. But, having read at least a sampling of stories from every era and tradition within the field, you'll at least know what has been done before: what cliches the audience will be weary of, what expectations the audience will bring to your tale, what you have to explain, and what you can take for granted. One warning, though. If you try to read everything so as not to repeat an idea that has already been used, you'll go mad. And even then, after your brilliant, original story has been published, some helpful reader will point out that the exact same idea was used in an obscure story by Lloyd Biggle, Jr., or Edmund Hamilton or John W. Campbell or H. Beam Piper or . . . you get the picture. You're reading all these stories to get a sense of how science fiction is done, not to become paranoid and decide that you can never come up with any new ideas as good as these. When I was reading Middle English romances for a graduate class at Notre Dame, I realized that almost every one of these thirteenth-century stories would make a terrific science fiction novel if you just changed the sea to space and the boats to starships. And most science fiction novels could easily be turned into fantasy by changing starships back into ocean-going vessels. Frank Herbert's Dune would fit right in with the best medieval romances, if planets became continents and the spice became a source of magical power instead of a drug necessary for space navigation. There is nothing new under the sun or beyond it, either. The novelty and freshness you'll bring to the field won't come from the new ideas you think up. Truly new ideas are rare, and usually turn out to be variations on old themes anyway. No, your freshness will come from the way you think, from the person you are; it will inevitably show up in your writing, provided you don't mask it with heavy-handed formulas or cliches. If there's one thing you should learn from reading all these tales, it's that, unlike many other genres, speculative fiction is not bound to follow any particular formula. There are a few formulas, it's true, but most stories don't follow them-or else follow them only because what may seem to be a formula is really a mythic story that has shown up in every culture where stories have been told at all. For science fiction and fantasy are the genres in which stories can hew closest to the archetypes and myths that readers in all times and places have hungered for. That's why writers in other genres often reach for our tools when they have a particularly powerful story to tell, as witness Mary Stewart's Merlin books, Mary Renault's novels of the ancient Hellenic world, E. L. Doctorow's slightly fractured history, and John Irving's talking-animal figures. Writers of mythic stories don't use "formulas"; they just tell the stories they bclieve in and care about. Inevitably, archetypal themes will show up again and again. But they only work if you are not aware of them; the moment you consciously treat them as formulas, they lose the power to stir the blood of any but the most naive readers. Boundary 4: The Literature of the Strange Having carefully explained to you that science fiction and fantasy are merely labels for (1) an arbitrary, viselike publishing category, (2) a fluid, evolving community of readers and writers, and (3) a ghetto in which you can do almost anything you like once you learn what others have already done, I will now essay a real definition of the terms. This last boundary is the clearest-and probably the least accuratedefinition of science fiction and fantasy: Speculative fiction includes all stories that take place in a setting contrary to known reality. This includes: 1. All stories set in the future, because the future can't be known. This includes all the stories speculating about future technologies, which is, for some people, the only thing that science fiction is good for. Ironically, many stories written in the forties and fifties that were set in what was then the future-the sixties, seventies, and eightiesare no longer "futuristic." Yet they aren't "false," either, because few science fiction writers pretend that they are writing what will happen. Rather we write what might happen. So those out-of-date futures, like that depicted in the novel 1984, simply shift from the "future" category to: 2. All stories set in the historical past that contradict known facts of history. Within the field of science fiction, these are called "alternate world" stories. For instance, what if the Cuban Missile Crisis had led to nuclear war? What if Hitler had died in 1939? In the real world, of course, these events did not happen-so stories that take place in such false pasts are the purview of science fiction and fantasy. 3. All stories set on other worlds, because we've never gone there. Whether "future humans" take part in the story or not, if it isn't Earth, it belongs to fantasy and science fiction. 4. All stories supposedly set on Earth, but before recorded history and contradicting the known archaeological record-stories about visits from ancient aliens, or ancient civilizations that left no trace, or "lost kingdoms" surviving into modern times. 5. All stories that contradict some known or supposed law of nature. Obviously, fantasy that uses magic falls into this category, but so does much science fiction: time travel stories, for instance, or invisibleman stories. In short, science fiction and fantasy stories are those that take place in worlds that have never existed or are not yet known. The moment I offer this definition, however, I can think of many examples of stories that fit within these boundaries yet are not considered science fiction or fantasy by anyone. For instance, despite some romanticizing, Felix Salten's wonderful novel Bambi is a brutally accurate account of the lives of deer. Yet because in his book the animals talk to each other, something that animals simply do not do, does Bambi become fantasy? Perhaps, after a fashion-but you'll never find it in the fantasy section of the bookstore; you'll never find it on any fantasy fan's list of his fifty favorite fantasy novels. It doesn't fall within the boundaries of the publishing category, the expectations of the community of readers and writers, or even the raw listing of what sf and fantasy writers have written. What about The Odyssey and The Iliad? They contain magic and gods aplenty, and it's hard to imagine any contemporary reader claiming that they represent the way the world really was at the time of the Trojan War, yet they were composed for an audience that believed in these gods and these heroes. To taleteller and talehearer, they were poems about history and not fantasies at all; they were epic, not mythic, tales. Indeed, there are many who would claim that my definition of speculative fiction clearly includes the Bible and Paradise Lost, though there are many other people today who would be outraged to hear of either being classified as fantasy. And what do we make of jean Auel's prehistoric romances? They certainly contradict an archaeologist's vision of the past, yet they are presented as if they correspond to reality. And what about genre-bending books like the recent Moondust and Madness or Jacqueline Susann's posthumously published first novel, Yargo? Both have spaceships and visitors from other planets, but everything else about them clearly identifies them as pure romance novels, with no hint of any knowledge or understanding of the science fiction tradition. They fit my definition-but anyone familiar with what science fiction and fantasy really are would repudiate them at once. And what about horror novels? Many of the works of Stephen King are clearly fantasies-some are even science fiction-and both King and his audience would be quick to say so. Yet many other works in the horror genre don't contradict known reality in any way; they fit in the genre because they include perfectly believable events that are so gruesome or revolting that the audience reacts with fear or disgust. Still, despite its inadequacies, my definition has its uses. For one thing, while it includes many works that really don't belong in the genre, it doesn't exclude any works that do. That is, your story may fit my definition and still not be sf or fantasy, but you can be sure that if your storydoesn't fit my definition it definitely isn't within the genre. Even works by established sf or fantasy writers that are included within the genre mainly out of courtesy (or force-fitting by publishers) make some bows, however desultory, toward fitting this definition. They at least offer the possibility that the story violates known reality at some point. More important is the fact that by this definition, speculative fiction is defined by its milieu. The world in which the story takes place is the genre boundary line. If a story doesn't take the reader into an otherwise unknowable place, it isn't speculative fiction. One of the primary appeals of all fiction is that it takes the reader into unfamiliar places. But how unfamiliar is it? Like chimps in the savannas of Africa, the human audience for fiction is both afraid of and attracted to strangeness. The chimp, confronted with a stranger who is not openly attacking, will retreat to a safe distance and keep watch. Gradually, if the stranger is doing something interesting, the chimp will be attracted. Curiosity overcomes fear. Or if the stranger's actions seem threatening, the chimp will flee, call for help, or try to frighten the stranger away, as fear overcomes curiosity. Human beings also exhibit this love-fear attitude toward strangenessfor instance, we see the fear in racism, the curiosity in the way people slow down to rubberneck as they drive past an accident on the freeway. Our attitude toward strangeness is also a key element in the way we choose the stories we believe in and care about. If a tale we're reading or watching on the screen is too familiar, it becomes boring; we know the end from the beginning and switch off the set or set the book aside. Yet if it is too unfamiliar, we reject the story as unbelievable or incomprehensible. We demand some strangeness, but not too much. Fortunately, no two people want exactly the same mix of strangeness and familiarity. Some are content to read the same stories over and over again, with only a few cosmetic details changed-or so it appears to those of us who don't enjoy gothics or bodice-rippers or teen romances or literary novels about writers who can't write or painters who can't paint. Others are forever searching for something new or different, so they can no longer recognize the verities contained in old familiar stories-or so it seems to those of us who don't enjoy literary experiments like those of Faulkner, Joyce, or Robbe-Grillet. Speculative fiction by definition is geared toward an audience that wants strangeness, an audience that wants to spend time in worlds that absolutely are not like the observable world around them. This is not to say that all science fiction and fantasy stories are fresh ventures into the unknown. Many readers, having once discovered a strange world that they enjoy, want to return to that same world again and again, until they're more familiar with that imaginary place than they are with the real-world town they live in. Many speculative fiction readers who came to the genre in their teens, when they hungered for strangeness and surprise and wonder, continue to read in the genre well into middle age, when they long for the repetitive or familiar-and such readers find no shortage of sf and fantasy that will deliver the right dose of nostalgia. Yet even the most hackneyed, shopworn science fiction or fantasy tale will feel startling and fresh to a naive reader who doesn't know the milieu is just like the one used in a thousand other stories. For the intrinsic difference between speculative and real-world fiction is that speculative fiction must take place in an unknowable world. At some point, every science fiction and fantasy story must challenge the reader's experience and learning. That's much of the reason why the genre is so open to the experimentation and innovation that other genres reject-strangeness is our bread and butter. Spread it thick or slice it thin, it's still our staff of life. Boundary 5: Between Science Fiction and Fantasy There's one more boundary that will matter to you-the boundary between science fiction and fantasy. That's the boundary that I ran into when I tried to sell "Tinker" to Analog. The division is a real one. There are writers who exclusively write one or the other; there are important differences in the way they are written. There are even differences in the audience-common wisdom has it that more males read science fiction while more females read fantasy. The result is that the quarrels between fantasy and science fiction often take on overtones of the war between the sexes. And that's only the beginning of the ugliness. Serious science fiction writers have actually published letters or articles in which they regard fantasy as somehow a threat to "good" science fiction, sometimes because fantasy seems to be crowding science fiction off the bookstore shelves, and sometimes because too many science fiction writers are being as "sloppy" or "sentimental" in their writing as fantasy writers are. Then serious fantasy writers respond with a passionate defense of their own field-and snide remarks about science fiction as an expression of the adolescent male love affair with machines. I have found these quarrels to be almost as sad as they are funny-like bitter arguments between small children in the same family. Don't touch me. You hit me first. I hate you. You stink. The fact is that what crowds out good science fiction is bad science fiction; science fiction improves when it borrows the best techniques of fantasy, and fantasy improves when it borrows appropriate techniques from science fiction. I suppose all the arguing does no harm-but it doesn't enlighten us much, either. Most of us who write speculative fiction turn with equal ease from fantasy to science fiction and back again. I've written both, and have found my fantasy stories to be no easier to write, no less rigorous than my science fiction; nor have I found my science fiction to need any less sense of mythic undertone or any less passionate action than my fantasy stories. Why, then, do you even need to think about the difference? First, because fantasy and science fiction are separate publishing categories. Most book publishers who offer both kinds of speculative fiction have separate imprints for fantasy and science fiction-or at least put one term or the other on the spine. Some even maintain a separate editorial staff for each genre. And the magazines are keenly aware of the difference between science fiction and fantasy, either because they don't publish fantasy or because they have to maintain the proper balance between them in order to hold their audience. Yet in most bookstores, fantasy and science fiction are lumped together in the same group of shelves, alphabetized by author with no attempt to separate one from the other. And they're right to do so. Those few misguided bookstores that try to have separate science fiction and fantasy sections find that most authors who have books in one section also have books in the other. This can be very confusing for would-be buyers. "Where's the latest Xanth novel?" asks the fifteenth kid today. "I found Piers Anthony's books in the sci-fi section, but you don't have any Xanth books there." "That's because the Xanth books are fantasy," says the patient bookstore clerk. "They're in the fantasy section." "Well that's stupid," says the kid. "Why don't you have his books together?" And the kid is right. It is stupid. Science fiction and fantasy are one literary community; while there are many who read or write just one, there are many more who read and write both, and it's foolish to divide them in the store. After all, sf and fantasy have a largely author-driven market. While there are certainly some readers who buy sf or fantasy like Harlequin romances, picking up anything with a spaceship or an elf on the cover, there are many others who search for favorite authors and buy only their works, only rarely branching out to sample books by writers unknown to them. These readers expect to find all of an author's books together on the shelves. They don't want "a science fiction novel" or "a fantasy"they want the latest Asimov or Edding, Benford or Donaldson, Niven-and-Pournelle or Hickman-and-Weis. But there is a time when the division between science fiction and fantasy really matters-and that's when you're writing the story. Here's a good, simple, semi-accurate rule of thumb: If the story is set in a universe that follows the same rules as ours, it's science fiction. If it's set in a universe that doesn't follow our rules, it's fantasy. Or in other words, science fiction is about what could be but isn't; fantasy is about what couldn't be. In the main, this boundary works pretty well. As rational people, we know that magic doesn't work and superstitions are meaningless. So if magic works in your story, if superstitions come true, if there are impossible beasts like fire-breathing dragons or winged horses, if djinns come out of bottles or mumbled curses cause disease, then you're writing fantasy. You must inform your reader as quickly as possible after the beginning of your story whether it's going to be fantasy or science fiction. If it's science fiction, and you signal this to the reader, then you have saved yourself enormous amounts of effort, because your reader will assume that all the known laws of nature apply, except where the story indicates an exception. With fantasy, however, anything is possible. And where anything can happen, who cares what actually occurs? I mean, if your hero can get into Trouble and then wish his way out, so what? Why worry about him? Why care? The truth is that good fantasies carefully limit the magic that's possible. In fact, the magic has to be defined, at least in the author's mind, as a whole new set of natural laws that cannot be violated during the course of the story. That is, if at the beginning of the story you have established that your hero can make only three wishes, you better not have him come up with a fourth wish to save his neck right at the end. That's cheating, and your reader will be quite correct to throw your book across the room and carefully avoid anything you ever write in the future. All speculative fiction stories have to create a strange world and introduce the reader to it-but good fantasy must also establish a whole new set of natural laws, explain them right up front, and then faithfully abide by them throughout. Having said all this, I must now point out that there are numerous exceptions. For instance, by this definition time travel stories in which the hero meets himself and stories that show spaceships traveling faster than light should all be classed as fantasy, because they violate known laws of nature-and yet both are definitely classed as science fiction, not fantasy. Why? One explanation is that people were writing these stories as science fiction before the relevant laws of science were widely known, and so these tales remain science fiction under a sort of grandfather clause. Another explanation is that there was no commercial publishing category of fantasy until the 1960s, so a lot of fantasy came to live quite comfortably within the tent of science fiction and, when the fantasy publishing category came into existence, nobody bothered to move them from one category to the other. They were already conventional. But to all these explanations I say "bunk." Time travel and faster-than light (FTL) starships respect the real boundary between fantasy and science fiction: They have metal and plastic; they use heavy machinery, and so they're science fiction. If you have people do some magic, impossible thing by stroking a talisman or praying to a tree, it's fantasy; if they do the same thing by pressing a button or climbing inside a machine, it's science fiction. So in a sense even science fiction stories have to define the "rules of magic" as they apply in the world of the tale, just as fantasies do. If FTL travel is possible in your science fiction universe, you have to establish that fact early on. If you want time travel, you must either make the story be about time travel or establish immediately that time travel is commonplace in the world of the story. Still, the difference remains: If a story is perceived as fantasy, the reader must be told as soon as possible the "natural laws" that apply in this fantasy world, whereas if the story is perceived as science fiction, the reader will assume that the natural laws of this universe apply until he is told otherwise. Note that this applies only to the beginning of the story. Your "fantasy" might end up with all seeming magic explained away as perfectly natural phenomena; your "science fiction story" might end up being a tale of witchcraft or vampirism in space. Indeed, this is exactly what Sheri Tepper did in her nine-volume True Game series. The story deals with people who spend their lives acting out an elaborate chesslike game, discovering and using innate magical abilities like shape-changing. Never mind that by the third volume you learn that these people are all descended from colonists who came to this planet from Earth. Don't be distracted by the conclusion, which explains in perfectly natural terms where all their seemingly magical powers come from. The story begins with a fantasy feel, so that Tepper has to unfold the laws of the universe very early in the first volume, the way a fantasy writer must. On the other hand, David Zindell's brilliant science fiction novel Neverness ends up with almost as many gods and mythical, magical events as the Iliad and Odyssey combined. Yet because it begins with a science fiction feel, the reader assumes from the start that the laws of the known universe apply with exceptions. The book is correctly marketed as science fiction, and that's how it's received. These are the boundaries of speculative fiction, and within that country, the boundary between science fiction and fantasy. There are high walls here and there, and high-voltage fences, and moats with alligators-but there's always a way over or under or around the obstacle. You must be aware of the boundaries; you must tread carefully whenever you get near one; but you are not their prisoner. Indeed, you might think of the genre boundaries not as obstacles, but rather as dikes and levees that hold out the river or the sea. Wherever they are raised up, they allow you to cultivate new land; and when you need a new space to plant your story, just put up a new dike where you want it to be. If enough of us like your story, we'll accept your new boundary as the true one, and plant a few stories of our own in your new-found land. It's the best gift we can give each other. We're all of us harvesting crops in lands opened up by the pioneers in our field-Wells, Verne, Merritt, Haggard, Lovecraft, Shelley, Tolken, and many others. But we're none of us confined to the territory they discovered. It's just the starting point. How can we create the literature of the strange if we stay in well-mapped lands?

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