Some books can get away with taking a great deal for granted. If you’re writing a novel about World War II, you can make assumptions that your audience is familiar with who the Allies and the Axis are, that they get the general military technology of the time, and that they understand the general areas of battle. Getting more specific, even writing a generic sci-fi novel allows for some assumptions. While you might have to delve into how you achieve FTL travel or why you chose particle beam lasers versus rail guns, most sci-fi readers get that there will be spaceships and aliens and time travel.
However, as I’ve gotten into writing my new sci-fi/fantasy
mashup novel, I’ve found that I have to spend a little more time than usual
building the world. After all, these two
types of settings – fantasy and science fiction – are usually diametrically
opposed. The presence of science usually
negates the presence of magic, and vice-versa.
Beyond that, I’ve discovered that I need to give more context to my
world so that the reader will know not only why the science fiction elements
are present, but why they interact with the world they discover. Moreover, I have to establish why the various
realms of my fantasy world react to both the new presence of a spacefaring race
and to each other, given that the world is not unified(no realm in
fantasy is…nor should it be). So I have
to establish why the dwarves hate the elves, and how the demons factor into how
each kingdom plays off of one another.
It's both fun and tedious.
It’s fun in that I’m really enjoying creating the realms and figuring
out how magic and science interact, and why they would have to do so. Tedious in that it’s going to take a while to
get into the main story, and the novel is likely to be so much larger than any
other I’ve created. Jumping right into
why a spaceship from Earth is exploring the galaxy, and why it interacts with a
diverse group of fantasy realm creatures in the way it does. If I just put them in place and had a new war
with demons break out, folks would quite rightly scratch their heads and wonder
why they should care, but by establishing the unfamiliarity of the visitors to
both traveling between stars and knowledge of magic(on a world where they
weren’t expecting to find any intelligent life in the first place), I can draw
readers in to giving a shit about why things are happening. Basically, the entire thing revolves around
uncertainty, which I feel would be the case when visiting a new world, magic
available or not.
Of course, beyond the uncertainty, one of the biggest
things I’m working on is why folks should care about any of these
characters. I worry I might be building
up one realm to be a little too arrogant, making them ripe for readers to want
to see them fall, so I’ll have to scale back on that as I continue to
write. It’s just gonna take time…which
was the point of this post to begin with…
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