Authors: Ben Bova
“You’re a criminal because of some psychological maladjustment,” Scarpato said. “At least, that’s what the head-shrinkers claim. So we freeze you and keep you frozen until science figures out a way to cure you. That way, we’re not punishing you; we’re
rehabilitating
you.”
“You can’t do that! I got civil rights...”
“Your civil rights are not being infringed. Once you’re found guilty by a jury of your peers you will be frozen. You will not age a single day while in the liquid nitrogen. When medical science learns how to cure your psychological unbalance, you will be thawed, cured, and returned to society as a healthy, productive citizen. We even start a small bank account for you which accrues compound interest, so that you’ll have some money when you’re rehabilitated.”
“But that could be a thousand years in the future!” del Vecchio screamed.
“So what?”
“The whole world could be completely changed by then! They could revive me to make a slave out of me! They could use me for meat, for Chrissakes! Or spare parts!” He was screeching now, in absolute terror.
Scarpato shrugged. “We have no control over that, unfortunately. But we’re doing our best for you. In earlier societies you might have been tortured, or mutilated, or even put to death. Up until a few years ago, you would have been sentenced to years and years in prison; a degrading life, filled with violence and drugs and danger. Now— you just take a nap and then someday someone will wake you up in a wonderful new world, completely rehabilitated, with enough money to start a new life for yourself.”
Del Vecchio broke into uncontrollable sobs. “Don’t. For God’s mercy, Chris, don’t do this to me. My wife... my kids...”
Scarpato shook his head. “It’s done. Believe me, there’s no way I could get you out of it, even if I wanted to. Your wife has found herself a boyfriend in Switzerland, some penniless count or duke or something. Your kids are getting along fine. Your girlfriends miss you, though, from what I hear.”
“You sonofabitch! You dirty, scheming...”
“You did this to yourself, Del!” Scarpato snapped, with enough power in his voice to silence del Vecchio. “You thought you had found a nice fat loophole in the law, so you could get away with almost anything. You thought the rest of us were stupid fools. Well, you made a loophole, all right. But the people—those shopkeepers and unemployed bums and screwy housewives that you’ve walked over all your life—they’ve turned your loophole into a noose. And your neck is in it. Don’t blame me. Blame yourself.”
His eyes still flowing tears, del Vecchio pleaded, “Don’t do it to me, Chris. Please don’t do it. They’ll never wake me up. They’ll pull the plug on me...”
“Don’t think that everyone’s as dishonest as you are. The convicts will be kept frozen. It only costs a thousandth of what it costs to keep a man in jail. You’ll be safe enough.”
“But they’ll thaw me out sometime in the future. I’ll be all alone in the world. I won’t know anybody. It’ll be all strange to me. I’ll be a total stranger...”
“No you won’t,” Scarpato said, his face grim. “It’s practically certain that Marchetti and Don Carmine will both be thawed out when you are. After all, you’re all three suffering from the same dysfunction, aren’t you?” That’s when the capillary in del Vecchio’s brain ballooned and burst. Scarpato saw his friend’s eyes roll up into his head, his body stiffen. He slammed the emergency call button beside the bed and a team of medics rushed in. While Scarpato watched, they declared del Vecchio clinically dead. Within an hour they slid his corpse into a waiting stainless steel cylinder where it would repose until some happier day in the distant future.
“You’re out of time now, Del,” Scarpato whispered as a technician sealed the end of the gleaming dewar. “Really out of time.”
Once a year, with the regularity of springtime, Sylvia Burack suggests that I write an article for her magazine, The Writer. She is a remarkable woman and a dear friend, and she always manages to hit upon an intriguing idea that fastens itself inside my brain and refuses to let go until I’ve completed the requested article. For the prospective writers among us, this essay, thanks to Sylvia Burack, a woman who has spent her life trying to help writers.
Writers are always urged to base their stories on their own experiences. “Write what you know about,” is the watchword. But in science fiction, where the story is inevitably set in a world that does not exist here and now, how can you “write what you know about?”
To make the problem even more confusing, most science fiction stories are written in a very naturalistic, realistic style. Fantastic scenes and incredible deeds are set on paper in a fashion that’s almost journalistic. The “grand old men” of the field—H. G. Wells and Jules Verne—wrote with meticulous attention to realistic detail. Modern science fiction writers lean much more toward Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, stylistically, than they lean toward Henry James or William Faulkner.
How can you write realistically about things that have never happened, places that no human eye has ever seen, times that are yet to come?
Over the many decades of science fiction’s existence as a distinct literary form, science fiction writers have developed skills and techniques that have allowed them to explore the whole wide universe of space and time in stories that are wholly believable. In fact, in many cases science fiction stories are more realistic than the neurotic mumblings of so-called “contemporary” fiction. (Indeed, this is one reason why many writers from outside the science fiction field are using science fiction ideas and techniques to write their stories today.)
We should pay special attention to six of the techniques that the science fiction writers have developed. They are:
1. Characterization
2. Extrapolation
3. Research
4. Projection
5. Speculation
6. Consistency
Characterization.
Every piece of fiction succeeds or fails on the strength of the story’s characters. Readers identify with strong, well-defined characters. They tend to dismiss stories in which the characters are dull or demeaning.
Many science fiction stories have been written in which the characters play a strictly secondary role to the scientific or political ideas in the story. For the most part, these are “gimmick” stories—interesting, but not memorable. The best science fiction stories, just like the best of any kind of fiction, present interesting characters who struggle mightily to solve weighty problems.
The best—and easiest—way to make a story realistic is to people it with realistic characters. Always pattern fictional characters on people you know personally and have studied firsthand for some time. A painter or a sculptor uses a model for his work; why shouldn’t a writer? Don’t be afraid that your model will recognize him or herself in the finished story. As you write, the story’s characters will take on their own personalities—each character in the story will become a blend of several persons you know, plus your own fictional inventions. People hardly ever recognize themselves in fiction, unless their “portrait” has been very deliberately made into an exact replica of the model.
Write about people you know, and emotions that you have personally experienced. If the closest you have been to the Pentagon is a hike through the woods of Virginia, don’t expect to be able to write realistically about the inner workings of the men and women in the Pentagon!
In science fiction, the characters are not always human beings. They can be alien creatures, robots, computers, or even intelligent dolphins.
But they must behave like humans,
or they will either bore or baffle the reader. Each character, no matter what he/she/it looks like, must experience human problems and show some semblance of human emotions. Think of Spock, on TV’s classic
Star Trek
series. He is alien in appearance and most of the time he is alien in behavior. But underneath it all (and not so deep that the viewer cannot see it) Spock has human emotions of loyalty, courage, humor and love.
Arthur C. Clarke made the computer HAL the most human character of his
2001: A Space Odyssey.
HAL had great strengths, but he went neurotic, became a murderer, and was “executed” by the robot-like human astronaut in the story. Everyone who saw that film felt a pang of regret as HAL was “turned off.”
Robert A. Heinlein—another giant of the field—created an even more human-like computer in his masterful novel,
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.
This computer, nicknamed Mike (after Mycroft, Sherlock Holmes’ older brother) led a war of liberation on the Moon, and suffered tragically as a result.
In science fiction, the characters don’t all have to look human, but they must behave in human ways. The reader will accept, trust,
believe
a story that has interesting, exciting, believable characters in it.
Extrapolation.
Many science fiction stories are triggered when the author asks a question that begins with, “If this goes on...?”
If we use up all the energy fuels on Earth without developing new energy sources to replace them, what happens?
If medical science finds cures for every disease and people begin to live for hundreds or even thousands of years, how does the world change?
If nuclear weapons proliferate to the point where every nation has H-bombs...
If computers and automated machinery take over
all
the jobs...
If we find intelligent life in space...
If we successfully clone human beings...
All these “ifs” are the beginnings of valid science fiction stories. Writers have learned to start story ideas perking by taking the world exactly as it is today, and then following one of these “ifs” to the point where an interesting story begins to develop. You may have to extrapolate several centuries into the future. Or only as far as next week.
H. G. Wells established the technique of starting his stories in a completely contemporary setting. Everything quite normal and here-and-now. Then he would add one tiny change to the scene: a time machine, a serum for invisibility, an invasion from Mars. The story then showed how our here-and-now world would alter as a result of this change.
Classic science fiction formula!
Research.
No writer knows everything. Especially when you are dealing with the future, with events that have not happened and places where no human being has set foot, you cannot know enough to build a realistic story entirely out of your imagination.
Fantasies can be written strictly from imagination. But a good science fiction story demands realistic details. If your story is set on one of the moons of Jupiter, you had better know something about the physical conditions of that place, otherwise your story will not ring true. (And there are plenty of science fiction
readers
who will gleefully point out any errors of fact that you may make!)
Once I wanted to write a “man against nature” story—a sort of latter-day Jack London tale—set on the Moon. This was years before the Apollo astronauts landed there, but NASA and the Russians had put enough hardware on the Moon so that it was possible to draw a fairly accurate picture of what conditions there must be.
The story I eventually wrote was titled “Fifteen Miles.” Its description of the Moon’s surface is valid today, largely because I immersed myself in every available book, report, and photograph of the Moon’s surface before I wrote the story.
Research is vital to realism.
It stands to reason that if the best stories come from “writing what you know about,” and you want to write stories about places where no one has ever been—then you must at least do enough homework to learn what is known about such places.
Much of the phoniness that is apparent in many science fiction films and television shows stems from the fact that the Hollywood people don’t do much research. They think nobody knows or cares about realism in science fiction. That is why their shows inevitably seem hollow and stilted.
Become a thorough researcher. Learn all there is to know about a subject before you write about it.
Then
you can add your own imaginative details to this basic background of fact. This will produce stories that are highly colorful, yet totally believable.
Projection.
This is one of the oldest science Fiction tricks. Take an episode from history and “project” it into the future.
Isaac Asimov’s brilliant
Foundation
series began when Dr. Asimov started thinking about Gibbon’s massive
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Many of the “fantastic” battles in deep space in E. E. “Doc” Smith’s epic novels are based on actual naval battles fought on the oceans of Earth. My own first novel was a “projection” of the conquests of Alexander the Great into an interstellar setting.
Take a bit of history that interests you—the American Revolution, the travels of Marco Polo, the struggles of a great artist—and project them into a futuristic setting. At least you start your story with a strong sense of character and plot. From there on, it’s up to you.
Speculation.
If extrapolation begins by asking the question, “If this goes on...?” then speculation starts by asking, “What if...?”
What if a new Ice Age begins covering North America with glaciers?
What if flying saucers really are visitors from other worlds?
What if Russia conquers the world? What if
we
do?
At first glance, it might seem that speculation is just the opposite of realism. Certainly, where the techniques of research, extrapolation, and even projection all deal with carefully building up a realistic future scenario on the basis of presently-known facts, the technique of speculation seems to be a wild, blind leap into the unknown.
But speculation is often necessary for a good science fiction story. If your story has
only
carefully-researched facts and small extrapolations into the near future, you may end up with a story that’s tame, dull, predictable. And if there’s one thing that’s death to a story, it is predictability. The reader must be kept guessing, must be surprised and delighted with each turn of the page. Otherwise, the reader stops turning those pages.