Writing Science Fiction: an article by GF Willmetts.

Introduction

I think people are beginning to forget how to write science fiction. I am referring to authentic science fiction, not the versions marketed as woke or gay. Nothing is wrong with that in itself, but it tends to become specialised, and my review team and vacancies are there if you want to join up; they find themselves not having much else to choose from, as they aren’t orientated that way in their reading.

From my perspective, as the years are passing, I’m wondering if new writers really know or are forgetting how to write science fiction. The piece below is really to give some pointers. Oddly, some of the examples I’ve used are sourced from film and TV rather than books, mostly because if you haven’t seen them, you will have at least heard of them. I make no claims they are perfect or even correct a lot of the time, but they might have you tuned in and thinking you can do better. If you have a nostalgic bend and a love of reading, there are a lot of good SF books out there that should be at least explored if they have the faintest resemblance to anything you are planning to write so you can at least explore a different path in your plotting.

I shall probably come back to the topic from time to time, so treat this article as a primer.

Categorisation of Science Fiction

A few years back, I divided Science Fiction into 17 categories, citing it was a big subject that could be afforded such divisions to appease different readers’ tastes, even if they could also be blended. I was most surprised when I googled my name against it that it popped up with my list. You can look it up for yourself without me doing a repeat here.

I still think sexual orientation and race are more about reader preference than a division of science fiction, and they’re unlikely to affect a story’s outcome. If anything, the reason these two are rarely explored in SF until recently is more to do with the writer’s idiom, ‘Write what you know.’ I doubt a hetero-orientated reader is going to go out and deliberately buy a gay-orientated novel of any genre. In other words, nobody questions the colour of human characters unless it’s stated; you just go along with the story. I remember reading one of Samuel R. Delany’s anthology stories; I think it was “The Star Pit”, and it wasn’t revealed until the end of the story that the lead character was Black.

At the time, I’d never seen a picture of Delaney and just took it as a clever twist. The fact that Delaney is both Black and gay had no bearing on his stories, and even he left it to the reader to decide the story’s merits. The story was the thing. I’m just making the point; it’s up to the reader to decide what the characters look like unless the writer specifically describes their appearance. The same principle applies to sexual orientation. It doesn’t need to be forcefully included. A lot of the time, it’s easier to let the reader imagine the details than make an issue of them, as this approach can enhance the reader’s engagement and personal connection to the narrative.

What Is Science Fiction?

Let’s delve into the definition of science fiction, where the unifying element lies in its name: science. The stories don’t have to rotate around the use of science, but it’s definitely involved in what creates the reality the story takes place in and how the reality functions. Hard science fiction adheres strictly to the current scientific laws. So there is no travelling beyond the speed of light, time travel, or any of the classic SF tropes.

With other Science Fiction, where there is a deviation, one has to consider the ramifications of the change and the effects this would have. Faster-than-light travel and time travel are now such commonly accepted terms that even those who do not follow science fiction understand their meanings and, with some effort, are familiar with the grandfather paradox without requiring extensive explanations in a story. They are well-worn themes, but an SF author can still find a new twist or solution to explore if it’s an important element in the story. If anything, they allow the story to do things like visiting another inhabited planet within a single lifespan. Whether some new science or invention will allow such things one day remains to be seen, but, where possible, it’s considered a little acceptable fudge – more on that later – as long as the other laws of science are adhered to.

It is important to understand how a change in any of our current scientific laws will affect reality. The most common one is anti-gravity. People often speak of it as if it were something easy to accomplish. It isn’t. What holds our reality together is gravity. It’s a very weak force, but if it were significantly reduced or removed, all atoms would fly from each other because that is what holds matter together. When Newton’s laws of gravity are taken into account, an object would fly off into space if subjected to it, spreading its atoms along the way. It would be very destructive. If it isn’t isolated, then the entire world would be destroyed.

So how could such a lack of gravity be isolated? No SF author has ever explained how; he has just taken it as a given, but outside of Isaac Asimov’s short story ‘The Billiard Ball’ in ‘Asimov’s Mysteries’, no one has given much thought to what would really happen, and he only reduced inertia. However, when you consider it takes a cyclotron, a type of particle accelerator, to break up an atom into subatomic particles, it requires a lot of power. I doubt if even alien technology could do that for something smaller or even for a complete object.

Reducing gravity can be achieved in space, but it doesn’t go away. If you boost a spacecraft, any semblance of gravity would be directed towards the wall that becomes the floor nearest the thrusting engines, unless a centrifuge like the USS Discovery in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ provides counter-rotation. So, most sci-fi films and shows are wrong, mainly due to the cost of doing it right, and you’d have to rotate the camera, or else people would be walking on the side of your TV. Having a gravity mass below decks as given with ‘Star Trek’s Starfleet spaceships’ might achieve it for the upper decks, but those below this gravity mass would be upside down. If you could achieve some form of gravity control economically rather than no gravity, you could build houses in unusual places, allow the creation of alloys and drugs that would only have been considered in space before, and so forth. It wouldn’t just be considered for space travel.

As I said previously, a lot of Science Fiction isn’t really about scientific laws but their application in technology, much of which doesn’t require knowledge beyond O-level science. Even if you don’t have that qualification but need the knowledge, there are enough science books available to provide you with a general outline of the basics, their consequences, and the understanding required. If you’re creating a new scientific law to make something work, you need to understand how it integrates with the existing scientific laws and even how it’s been overlooked until now. When done skilfully, you can draw a reader into a topic. My favourite author, A.E. van Vogt, was very clever at doing that, as I’ve pointed out with his ‘Null-A’ novels, with laws and science before they had the recognised names we have today and, back in 1948, were really ahead of what could be achieved.

Before you invent a new scientific law, check that there is nothing similar out there already and, if you must, make a special case for a change discovered in it. Often, you only need to provide minimal explanation in the story, as readers do not want an in-depth analysis of the subject; they just need enough information to feel confident that you understand what you are discussing or applying, so it seems credible. I doubt if you would feel the need to explain how a car engine works in the context of a story. A lot of the time, unless it’s a new invention, people will take any gadget as something perfectly acceptable. For Science Fiction, a lot of this often becomes part of the background to the main plot and usually how the characters use the technology or their own interaction than any science law. The difference Science Fiction has from other genres is that there is a wider choice of solutions to the plot. The reader should be able to anticipate one of the plot solutions if clues and red herrings are laid out, allowing for a comparison to crime andmystery stories.

The Difference Between Science Fiction And Science Fantasy

The difference between Science Fiction and science fantasy, apart from the latter often being spelt in lowercase, is that the writers of the latter don’t worry about how anything works, even consistency, and just use whatever is there for the plot. This is in line with the definition of ‘fantasy’. As a consequence, if the author does not have a prepared solution for the ending, it creates an opportunity for a cheat, which is dishonest to the reader. In any genre, the author only needs to worry about the plot’s events, and it’s understood that there will be time lapses. This means that the narrative only gets unstuck with the time it takes to recover from injury or even cybernetic repairs. One only has to compare Martin Caiden’s novel ‘Cyborg’, the basis for the TV series ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’, which has the many months it took for surgery and making a bionic man, to, say, Luke Skywalker being given a bionic hand and using it within minutes in the 1980 film ‘The Empire Strikes Back’.

‘Star Wars’ might be set in a galaxy far, far away, but the differences that make it science fantasy amount to a lot. Consider the lightsabre, which has a finite length for its laser beam and lacks a mechanism to demonstrate how it violates a fundamental principle of light, specifically that light travels at 299,792,458 metres/sec (186,282 miles/sec) and would undoubtedly have penetrated the atmosphere. The passage never shows what the energy source is to power such a weapon or how it could be recharged. Such a device would use a lot of power. This may appear highly technical, but lightsabres never experience failures or power shortages. Of course, there are grey areas between the two genres. Take Doctor Who’s and the time lord’s sonic screwdriver. The sonic screwdriver is alien technology; however, as I pointed out in an article last year, it is essentially just an oscillator that functions like a magic wand, but only within certain limitations when used on metallic objects.

The same could be said of galactic empires. The distance between star systems, even with faster-than-light travel, becomes problematic for controlling so many in a single time frame by one overall emperor. For an SF writer, there would be a need to explain this; for a science fantasy writer, it just is. In real life, you would have problems keeping a galactic empire together for long when various planets want independence and do not pay a tithe or tax for staying together. With the distance between planets, a galactic war taking on more than one planet at a time isn’t practical. Something that is not always applied in our own reality is not to have too many wars going on at the same time, as they divide resources. The same would surely apply galactically unless you have a different means of control. Look at Asimov’s ‘Foundation and Empire’ and how the Mule upset that. The only common thing tends to be consistency. If it doesn’t have that, it allows the writer to cheat the reader, and when you do that, the reader will never trust you again, and that is a loss of sales.

You must also consider the time frame of inventions and discoveries. SF films frequently get this wrong. For the possibility of faster-than-light space travel, hibernation, synthetic humans, holograms and medical technology as advanced as that and as depicted in the 2012 film ‘Prometheus’, not to mention the trillion-dollar investment of the spacecraft to have it working within a 60-year framework from now, isn’t that plausible? I suspect the time frame was chosen for the viewer’s benefit of connection to the character rather than reality, which would place it at least a couple centuries later. Considering the lack of development since then and the age of the Nostromo in the 1979 film ‘Alien’, one would have to consider their reality reached a plateau in all but terraforming.

Well, that and hibernation, which was clearly shown to develop so humans weren’t sick for 24 hours after revival. Looking at this again and the proliferation of synthetics, you do have to wonder why there wasn’t one at Hadley’s Hope in the 1986 film ‘Aliens’. Don’t just look on Google, but just think. The world of the 2024 film ‘Alien: Romulus’ was pretty much a dump, but it still had a synth, which is short for ‘synthetic human’, a type of android designed to perform tasks and interact with humans. Of course, in the 1986 film ‘Aliens’, the synthetic could have been destroyed by the xenomorphs. For me, this is just a mental exercise, but if you’re going to write Science Fiction, you need to be able to do such analysis so you learn how to question everything when developing your own reality and look for answers to justify what is shown.

Much of technology isn’t actually new; it’s just getting more sophisticated but is still a recognised function. A lot of it is just window dressing. A gun and a laser gun are still weapons, although the latter is just faster. Unlike depictions on the screen, a laser-based gun with a quick flash with enough energy would be fatal, not the length of time a ‘Star Trek’ phaser is shown. It would probably shear someone in half if kept on and not disintegrate them. Oh, and probably bore a hole through a starship’s hull and kill the user, and if sections weren’t locked off, most of the crew as well. You would certainly need to address a different choice in a story. I doubt if you would use such a gun in armed combat. In contrast. The PPG (phased plasma gun) of ‘Babylon 5’ has a limited range and not enough power to damage the space station’s hull.

The biggest surprise is in the advances in computer technology. The integrated chip ensured computers would shrink in size, and even though we’ve had computers for home use for over 35 years now, I doubt if anyone could have anticipated where we are today or how quickly it was embraced. SF writers could never take that into account, and hence SF in the Golden Age didn’t really use them much, let alone consider them portable because no one saw it coming or how it could be achieved. In many respects, the computer is the tool, not what its applications are, which can always be sourced. Some people good at maths can be just as fast as a calculator, but it opens up calculations for all and certainly beats the logarithms that I was taught at school.

Transport is just a way to go to different places faster. There is a progression from the horse and cart to a car to a train to a ship and an aeroplane. All terrestrial. Despite extensive research, people still perceive the original space rockets from books and films as a single, complete entity without any stages. When real life made them, rockets became multi-stage to overcome Earth’s gravity to get into orbit and then the amount of fuel to reach a moon or planet. We take all of that for granted now, but it pays to study the real thing we have and consider how it could improve. Then you have all kinds of complications. To navigate, you need to be going where the moon or planet is going to be in its orbit rather than where it currently is to conserve fuel. You also need to consider how you are going to decelerate on arrival. Unlike early SF films, you will find it easier to take a smaller vessel to land than take the entire spacecraft down. Going home is just a repeat process. Mostly.

The best template we really have is the spaceships we have today. Oddly, fiction rarely follows the same route. The same problems will still exist for interstellar flight and a need to go faster if the crew are to survive. The challenges associated with this issue only increase, making it even more difficult to develop the plot you intend to write. Your solutions will at least show the reader you’re not working in a vacuum (sic). Without FTL, it’s unlikely you could reach another star system in trouble within the same generation.

Teleportation is an odd subject. As far as we know, it doesn’t exist in nature. Outside of the wheel, much of what we have has a basis in nature, which man successfully copied. Teleportation has to be regarded as something of a different order of science, especially as it violates the conservation of matter/energy when nothing can be created or destroyed but says nothing about it being moved a distance. Even ‘entanglement’ can only be applied at the quantum level. It would take something fundamentally radical to move a bigger mass.

There is no such thing as a magic pill that can change things instantaneously. Even McCoy’s tablet that could grow a new kidney in the old lady in the 1986 film ‘Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home’ The Voyage Home’ wouldn’t be able to make a difference in hours, and why would the doctor have just that tablet in his emergency medical bag?

Science Fiction As A Warning.

Science fiction is the key genre for warning about the dangers of giving too much autonomy to artificial intelligence. At the moment, too much software is described as ‘AI’ but is just elaborate software. To have AI equivalents to SF’s best examples still has a long way to go.

A lot of early Science Fiction was used as a metaphor for showing how society can go wrong. George Orwell’s ‘1984’ showed that so blatantly that it was required reading at school. Considering the diversity of our societies today, I’m surprised it hasn’t made a comeback. Of course, it would be difficult, especially for the author, in such a regime to get it in print. Generally, though, Science Fiction can extrapolate where any regime can go where people are restricted in what they are allowed to do, so it can become a generalisation. This is one of the things that can make SF unique amongst the genres. George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ didn’t destroy communism; it just pointed out that too much control of a population by one or a few individuals tended to curb growth and development of a society and could be repeated by the next generation. We see the results of this across the world, and yet it is tolerated. More so, in societies that think they have social freedom but haven’t as much as they believe. Read into that what you may.

Fudge Isn’t Just Sweet.

My colleague Pauline Morgan says that in Science Fiction, you can get away with a couple fudges per story. Nothing to do with food, but something you can get away with because it’s an accepted norm and is used regularly. That’s why faster-than-light travel has an acceptance even though we know it can’t be done yet, if at all. The same with time travel. Even if that was possible, you can’t really interfere with the past without upsetting the present, unless it creates an alternative reality. This creates a problem regarding what is considered the ‘present’ and whether actions that interfere with the past, such as accidentally killing a close relative, affect your own life. Are you changing your reality or fulfilling it? Plot clauses. Even with some ‘fudges’, do have some idea how they work and how they affect your reality.

Probably the most common fudge in the likes of ‘Stingray’ and ‘Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea’ and, no doubt, other TV shows and films is visibility underwater. Even the 1989 film ‘The Abyss’ had to do something in between with strobe lights, or you wouldn’t see anything looking out into the ocean at depth. The same with none of them underwater speaking in high-pitched Micky Mouse voices because of the necessity to have more nitrogen than oxygen to allow for air pressure. It demonstrates a need to accommodate the viewer rather than stay true to the science.

I should point out that when it comes to SF films and TV series, there is nothing that can be regarded as absolute perfection, and mistakes creep in the longer they go on. Take the 1956 film ‘Forbidden Planet’. How could the Krell ID essence get on board the spaceship when it is later shown to be over 20 feet tall? Granted, it is powered by Morbius using the Krell machine, but it doesn’t seem to be driven by intelligent thought, just rage, growing more powerful as it attacks. I’ve already pointed out a lot of the problems with ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ over the years. Before video/DVD, no director expected their films to last forever or have such close scrutiny that we give them today and probably assumed viewers would just skip them or not remember them.

That doesn’t mean SF TV series can’t have a lasting effect. ‘Star Trek’ might be a fan favourite, but the merge over to universal acceptance and use in our reality must surely go to ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’ and ‘The Bionic Woman’ and the acceptance of the term ‘bionic’ for any artificial limb, despite not giving super strength or speed but giving similar properties to the original limbs. Saying that, when the cost can be brought down, how viable and how close are we to having true cyborgs? A mobile phone might look like a ‘Star Trek’ phaser or communicator in shape only. We are far more likely to accept true cyborgs because it restores limbs to those who lost their natural ones.

Again, you’ll notice by now that my examples are mostly from TV or film because there is a greater likelihood you would have seen or heard of them compared to the number of Science Fiction books out there, and those I’ve mentioned will have you looking for them as it is. Most of whom did adhere to Science Fiction concepts and their limitations until recent years. Quite why that is being forgotten post-Covid means we have fewer writers with at least an appreciation of science or not enough scientists writing fiction. As I commented above, you don’t have to be heavily qualified in the sciences to write Science Fiction, but enough not to make common mistakes with the basics without considering how you can explain it in the course of the story.

Don’t forget.

Another way to remember it is if you’re writing Science Fiction, get any science you’re using correct in how you apply it within the story. Those are the basics of hard science fiction and help if you’re conversant with real science. Hopefully, you might even have passed your O’levels or equivalent in your country in the subjects, mostly physics and biology, a lot more than chemistry. The application of any new science law needs to be considered against how it would affect the other laws. If you have spacecraft capable of travelling faster than the speed of light, just how much faster are they, and how does it affect relativity? If your communication device also applies, is it only as fast as the spacecraft, or does it go much faster? Ursula K. Le Guin did this with her Ansible device, but other than the name, others have followed a similar way. Just look at how you can find something that makes it your own.

It’s all a matter of understanding what you’re writing and the needs of your target audience. Science fiction is currently becoming extinct from lack of the needs of the readers and targeting minority readership. Can Science Fiction be written better? That is a question from every generation. It’s what you do with it and the changes in our current reality. We might be living in a world where science fiction fuels our devices, but no one has looked at how they are evolving and where that might lead based on what we have today. Science fiction has always been a gauge of where the future leads or doesn’t. Man might not go extinct with global warming, but future generations might become isolationists with our dependence on mobile phones and lack of attention spans. There’s certainly enough to give a warning about and about how a better future could even evolve from it.

Have I inspired you to consider writing Science Fiction as we normally expect it? We certainly need a proper revival, and it would only take a few breakout novels to get more people back reading it. SF films and TV shows can only go so far. Many of them are inspired or even rewritten from existing novels, some over 50 years old. Getting into these industries as scriptwriters is even tougher than getting into the book industry, but there are a lot more publishers to choose from, which can provide more opportunities for new authors to get their work recognised and published. Publishers like resurgences, especially when it means they can make money. Science fiction novels might not give a good return for any writer wanting to make a career of it right now, but they just need a decent sales record for them to return in force.

GF Willmetts

March 2026