Writing Meaningful Science Fiction
Science fiction is one of my favorite genres. Alien robots? Multiverse madness? Time travel shenanigans? Yes, please. 👽🛸
Sci-fi writing is not easy by any stretch, though. You must build a world full of details you have to get just right. You must have seeds of real science, while still letting your imagination take flight. The tech needs to be believable, the logic of your world needs to stay consistent, and you must balance how to introduce it all to your reader–without dumping an info-mountain on them. It’s a lot.
⚙️ Among all the fancy worldbuilding, the laser guns and the alien encounters, it can be easy to lose sight of one of the main reasons we come to sci-fi in the first place: to ask big questions.
Science fiction has always been concerned with examining where it’s all taking us. Sci-fi is, at heart, an exploration of what it means to be human. A way to envision possible futures. (Or pasts. Or alternate realities. Or…you get the idea.)
It can be with a sense of wonder: look at all the possibilities unfolding before us!
It can be with dread: what consequences could we face if we keep down the path we’re on?
But there should be a great question at the heart of your science fiction story.
⚙️ But readers don’t want ideological discussions or tangents; they want a compelling plot about characters they root for.
Like with any other fiction, weaving a theme into a story works best if it’s part of the main character’s journey.
Say your big question is whether or not genetic modification will help or hurt human happiness. How could your main character be forced to grapple with this issue firsthand? Wouldn’t you see the most growth if your protagonist THOUGHT they knew the answer at the beginning…but then found out how little they know? How could the issues at the heart of the story become more complex, more fraught, as the narrative unfolds? How could the issue come to a breaking point–a climax that forces the protagonist to make a choice one way or the other? Somehow, the central conflict should pull in this idea of genetic modification in a way that has very personal stakes for the main character.
⚙️ Watching your protagonist wrestle with problems that have no easy answer (because they MUST) is the best way to draw your reader in. It takes a big, ideological question and makes it personal, invested with emotions.
This is the heart of great sci-fi. It entertains and inspires. It helps us imagine what is possible. AND it gets us asking big, weird questions–by taking us on a journey with characters we care about.
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