When we spoke to NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty about the project, he mentioned that 27 novels composed during NaNoWriMo have been published in print. James Strickland’s first published novel was his NaNoWriMo cyberpunk novel Looking Glass, which he followed up this year with Irreconcilable Differences. Simon Haynes (who answered questions via email) also published his NaNoWriMo novel Hal Spacejock: No Free Lunch, the fourth installment of his Hal Spacejock series. We spoke with both authors about how they approach novel-writing, their experiences with NaNoWriMo, and their advice for aspiring novelists who find themselves in a creative jam.

What made you decide to participate in NaNoWriMo and try to write a novel in this way?

James Strickland: Well this is actually, I think, the sixth time I’ve done it, I’d have to check. But I did 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006. So it’d actually be the fifth time. And actually, what happened was in 2002, I’d been playing online role playing games a lot typing a lot, and I finally reached a point where I was starting to pull back from that. And I wanted to create some characters and had some interesting things that directly involved a role playing game. Plus, you know, I had a degree in writing and it always annoyed me that it had never actually earned me a dime. So I signed up for NaNoWriMo as soon as I heard about it and gave me a shot.

Simon Haynes: Initially it was the challenge of writing 50,000 words in a month. I'm a procrastinator, and even with a publishing contract under my belt and a publisher keen for more of my novels, I still find it hard to settle down to write. This is because I'd rather settle down and tinker with all my software programs.

Initially it was the challenge of writing 50,000 words in a month. I'm a procrastinator, and even with a publishing contract under my belt and a publisher keen for more of my novels, I still find it hard to settle down to write. This is because I'd rather settle down and tinker with all my software programs.

Do you go into NaNoWriMo with any sort of set plan or do you tend to go in cold?

James Strickland: No, I’m one of those writers who jumped in cold, basically starts writing and gets the narrator – I write in the first person almost exclusively – so I jump in get the narrator to talk to me. Normally for NaNo I wait until about a week in and I start writing an aimless roadmap of where I want the plot to go so I don’t get myself into corners. But no, normally I start with a blank page and somebody talking to me.

Is it easier for you to work with that deadline?

James Strickland: Yeah, it’s easier to bash the content out. Now, whether you’re going to get good content out is another matter. The NaNo novel that I’ve published took about another four or five months of work to polish it up and make it really sellable, because you know, it’s only half the length of a normal novel when you come out of NaNo, and there’s a lot of stuff in there that’s just…you’re in a hurry.

But do you come out with a better sense of where the story is going?

James Strickland: Yeah, as a first draft it’s great. It gives, at least for me, by the time I’m done with the NaNo novel, I’ve met all or most of my characters, have a general idea of the plot, a general idea of the emotional ebb and flow of the story, and it also nails down the world a great deal for me.

(To Simon Haynes) Your published NaNoWriMo novel features Hal Spacejock, a character from your previous books. Did you find that having that deadline changed the way you wrote about him? Did it change his world in any way? Was it more difficult to write a Hal Spacejock book with a 30-day deadline?

Simon Haynes: I'd say it's easier to get started, because I don't have to worry about the first chapter or so. My plot outline for chapters one and two can usually be described as 'Hal or Clunk makes a trivial mistake, with huge consequences' Then I spent the rest of the book torturing them with the consequences.

However, each Hal Spacejock novel is about 2/3 Hal and Clunk, and 1/3 someone else entirely. That someone else might be the antagonist who is trying to achieve some plan of their own, which inevitable leads to their crossing swords with our hero, or sometimes the other 1/3 of the book is written from the POV of another character with a major problem.

I believe that's what keeps the Hal books fresh. It's not just Hal-Hal-Hal…sometimes he's just background material for the real plot.

How long was the process from finishing the NaNoWriMo draft to publication?

Simon Haynes: Hal Spacejock No Free Lunch (released in June this year) was the first novel based on my NanoWrimo efforts. My novels evolve as I write them, so I can't point to Hal 4 and say 'I remember writing that section during November 2006' because it's likely only traces of DNA remain. I can say that I wrote and edited the novel between November 2006 and October 2007. (Yes, I handed it in last year and three days later I started on NanoWrimo again!)

Do you find that you get stuck while writing?

James Strickland: All the time. And I got a piece of advice from a panel that Connie Willis did once where she said, “Torture your characters.” If you find that you’re having a hard time going forward with a plot, torture the characters some more. Random bad things can always happen.

In my first novel, Looking Glass, I got stuck because I sent the character to California to resolve the story. She got there about halfway through the NaNo draft. If she got there and started resolving…first of all, I had no way to connect her to the plot there yet. I mean, she knew what was there, but she didn’t have any contacts there. And I also would have resolved the story in about the third week of November, which would have been way too soon, with too few words. So I had the nemesis of the thing, which she actually isn’t completely aware of yet, basically steal her identity. So it stole her identity when she’s on the train to California. So when she gets there and tries to use her credit cards, she gets arrested.

And that precipitated a whole other change in the story, because the only person she knew well enough in California to bail her out of jail was a character who didn’t even have a name. I mean, he was in the story from the beginning, but he didn’t have a name. He was just so-and-so’s boyfriend. But he’s the only person she knows who isn’t directly connected to the company that she’s trying to investigate/fight against. So she calls him, and they talk, and next thing I know they’re going to bed together. And I’m like, “Wait! Wait! What are you guys doing?” I mean, this is the kind of thing you get when you take every opportunity to twist the knife on your characters. I don’t like it much, but they do interesting things.

Simon Haynes: If I get stuck on a scene (or more likely, can't be bothered writing it) I just leave it blank and add a short description stating what the scene is supposed to cover. I use yWriter [a freeware novel writing tool which Haynes created] to manage my novels, which makes it much easier to skip ahead, backwards and sideways without losing sight of the whole.

Sometimes, if my manuscript is already 85000-95000 words, I never do end up writing those missing scenes. I just start the next one with 'After ...' followed by a brief description of the events. After all, if I can't drum up enough enthusiasm to write the scene, how interesting would it really be for the reader?

Do you always write in the science fiction genre? What do you particularly like about writing in the genre?

James Strickland: Always science fiction. Almost everything I’ve ever written, even going back to high school, I wrote science fiction.

What it lets you do is it lets you amplify things about modern societies that are otherwise hard to see. You can project the technology into the future and its effect on society. And you can then see that in sharp relief and you can play with it. The novel that I’m working on right now that isn’t part of NaNo, it’s the one I was working on before I started NaNo this year, you don’t really ever think too much about time, because we all go through time at the same speed: one second per second. But if you are dealing with a story with a time dilation, you travel through space and it’s a month for you and a hundred years around you, it changes your relationship with the people who you left behind and it changes your relationship with the society and it changes your relationship with technology. It affects a lot of things without that technological MacGuffin, if you like, of near light speed travel and time dilation. You don’t see it you don’t get a sharp relief of it, and writing science fiction let’s you do that.

Simon Haynes: I like to explore different genres within each novel, keeping them all within the future populated galaxy I've gradually outlined in the books.

For example, Hal 1 was a buddy movie book, with a fair bit of undergraduate humour. Hal 2 involved alien technology and immigration woes, Hal 3 was secret agents and conspiracies, and Hal 4 was equal parts (deep breath) police work, romance, horror, mystery and revenge. (I wasn't sure whether it was going to be the last one, so I really loaded 'er up.)

Is science fiction conducive to NaNoWriMo? Is it especially helpful for science fiction writers?

Simon Haynes: I think it can make things a little more difficult, because you have to invent an entire world, or galaxy, before you can write about it. Transport systems, communications, computers, etc, etc. You can't just write SF in a vacuum. (Hah!)

Are you participating in NaNoWriMo this year? What are you working on?

James Strickland: Yes. I’m working on a novel. It’s another science fiction novel. Almost everything I have published is cyberpunk, so it’s another cyberpunk novel. It’s set in the same world as my other two published novels. And as far as I can tell – I’m still figuring it’s out – it’s about a guy who works for the police in a fairly oppressive religious nation, where it’s a serious surveillance society. And he winds up with a case that someone’s thrown this light plane into a building and it’s his job to find out why and who. And as he starts digging then, of course, you run into – oh, here’s this huge conspiracy that is trying to cover up everything that’s involved with it. And they’re part of the government, but they’re at war with – I don’t know if you’ve read about this Anonymous that’s going after the Church of Scientology? This conspiracy organization is, in turn, having a war waged on them by an organization like that, except it’s not non-violent. So I went into the plot with the idea of I’d really like to see how this stand-alone complex would do against a classic Illuminati. But that’s the level I have the plot on. I didn’t know the characters until I started writing and I didn’t know how the plot was going to express. Now I’m starting to get a better idea.

Simon Haynes: Yes, I'm in there typing away. This time I'm writing Hal Spacejock book 5, which my publisher wants to release in November 2009. I'm hoping to get half the novel done this month (in a very basic first draft kind of way), and then finish it off over Jan-Mar next year.

So, would you recommend this process to others?

James Strickland: Yeah, I would recommend it a lot to people who say, “I want to write a novel someday.” It’s like, “Well, how does November strike you?” I would recommend it to people it like that. I would recommend it to people who are again caught editing a book forever. Do NaNo. Start over start a brand new book. Get your confidence back, because you really don’t have to sit, micromanage, edit. And one of the things I learned in writing class is that you don’t want to edit while you’re in the middle of creation, because you don’t want to stifle the creativity.

What advice would you give to folks who are stuck right now?

James Strickland: Torture the character. Find something bad that’s going to happen to them in the current circumstance and let them react to it. And that will usually get you going again. It may take the novel in places you didn’t plan, but if you have a roadmap you can then take it in a new direction that’s useful to you. But torture the characters. Any opportunity for bad things to happen with these people – killing them makes your story kind of short – is fine.

Simon Haynes: Easy. Write in 500 word chunks, one per hour. Don't sit down thinking 'I have to write 1800 words today to catch up', just sit and write 500 words. 15, 20, 30 minutes later, take the rest of the hour off. Then do another 500 words.

This year I'm trying to do 4 x 500 word chunks a day, which is three chunks for my word count and one extra for luck. I'm several thousand words ahead of my goal, and I don't feel like I've really sat down and written hard all month.

For more information on James Strickland and his novels, visit JamesRStrickland.com. For more information about Simon Haynes, yWriter, or Hal Spacejock, visit HalSpacejock.com.au.

Baty, who also wrote the novel-writing guide No Plot? No Problem!, started National Novel Writing Month in 1999. Each November, participants attempt to write 50,000 words of an entirely new novel, with little or no planning. Sound impossible? We caught up with Baty, who explained how impossible deadlines can inspire surprising works of fiction.

What got you started on turning this whole thing into this whole national movement? It’s becoming really huge.

It wasn’t at first. It was really never supposed to be national. In fact, the first year that I did it, it was just a bunch of us in the Bay Area in 1999. And the name “National Novel Writing Month” was sort of an inside joke that I think made us feel better about our sort of dismal chances of success. It was nice to kind of have a big-sounding name for what I was pretty sure was going to a pretty small thing.

So I think the idea kind of came from my past both working as an editor and putting out a ‘zine that I had done from the time I was about 22 years old until I was 27 or so. And it just seemed that when you give someone an impossible deadline, miracles happen, and things that you shouldn’t be able to pull off you can if the deadline is scary enough. And I think that was sort of the idea that drove this notion of writing a novel in a month – was you know, writing a novel seems like an impossible thing, so let’s give it a deadline and maybe that will make it doable. And strangely that’s kind of what happened. It really did.

There were 21 of us that first year and the books that we ended up writing were not great, but they weren’t abysmally, embarrassingly horrible. And to me, that felt like this tremendous accomplishment and I thought if we can do this, anyone can do this. So I put up a better website and extended the call a little bit wider the following year and it’s just grown from word of mouth from there.

It’s funny. I’ve talked to a lot of people online who say “Don’t talk to me. It’s November and I’m writing my novel.”

I feel like we owe a great apology to the blog readers of the world because I think that a lot of the great blogs are affected by this NaNoWriMo virus where all of the bloggers are sort of taken out of commission for the month of November.

And beyond people finishing the 50,000 words – which I think is amazing – you’ve had a lot of people get their novels published.

Yeah and it’s been interesting over the years to see the number of people who have ended up selling their NaNoWriMo manuscripts grow, because I never thought that would happen. It was really just supposed to be a creative kick in the pants, an adventuresome month spent running naked through your imagination. But it’s fantastic. It’s actually a pretty great way to get a book written. I mean you have to write the first draft in a month and then you go and spend probably the rest of the year actually revising it and expanding it, because, you know, 50,000 words is not really a classic literary length. You tend to preferably end up adding anywhere between 30 and 100,000 words on top of it. But yeah, more and more people have been finding publishers. I think we have 27 people so far have sold their manuscript to print publishers, and another probably three times that many have sold them to ebook publishers. And last year we had our first New York Times number one bestseller in Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants. And it’s amazing. I mean, I go to airport bookstores and there’s Water for Elephants and it’s a NaNoWriMo novel. It’s pretty cool.

I was talking to someone whose first published novel was a NaNoWriMo novel, and felt he really needed that experience.

That’s kind of the interesting thing about NaNoWriMo as it’s grown. I think there’s definitely a large group of people who just do it for the sake of doing it, because it’s outrageous amounts of fun, because it pokes your imagination in really nice ways. I think because it also improves your reading ability in this really interesting way where once you’ve actually written a book you read on a completely different level. You are able to see both the really exquisite but you’re also able to see the seams of the book that couldn’t see before and that’s really fascinating. But there are, I would say at this point, 20 percent of us participants taking part in National Novel Writing Month really as part of this multi-stage process of getting that thing sold. And it works really well and we’ve had more and more published novelists come and take part in this just because you know everybody needs that deadline. And the really nice thing is that we’ve paired that terrifying deadline with a really supportive, fun, funny community that absolutely takes this goal of 50,000 words very seriously but does not take themselves so seriously as a lot of writing sites do, that it’s okay to have fun, it’s okay to make mistakes, and it’s okay to learn by doing. And I think that is such a great atmosphere both for book lovers who are giving this a shot for the first time as well as book writers who do this for a living.

Do you have any sense of what genres are the most common for NaNoWriMo?

It’s pretty evenly spread out. I think our top genres are fantasy, science fiction, and literary fiction, however you define that, and romance is also a big one. And in terms of science fiction, there’s always been a huge contingent of scifi writers that have done NaNoWriMo and they were really some of the earliest adopters. I think because the science fiction reading community has already had so many great online resources so they were already in some ways gathered together on message boards and websites and blogs. And so the NaNoWriMo virus that I talked about earlier was really able to take hold because these are connected people already and so the word can really go out. When one person’s doing it, there’s “Oh, maybe we should all do this.” And I think that’s been one of the reasons that we have had such a high turnout among the science fiction writers and fans.

With science fiction writers, there’s often a lot of additional work going on: worldbuilding, creating new technology. Do you find that NaNoWriMo helps with that, or is it a hindrance to writing the novel?

Yeah, that’s a good question and you’re right. It’s interesting. I think certain genres lend themselves a little bit better to NaNoWriMo than others. Like mysteries are really – if you don’t know whodunit when you’re writing it, you’re kind of in trouble as a mystery writer. And I think science fiction writers – there’s worldbuilding – they do have a little more work to do. But I think the nice thing about NaNoWriMo for worldbuilders is it’s so easy to get bogged down in this sense of “I really need to understand the mechanics of spaceflight for this particular craft before I’m able to move forward in my story.” And I think that you can spend your entire life basically trying to populate these worlds and try to understand how the various technologies interact, how the various organisms, and all that stuff and at a certain point it just becomes an impediment to actually writing your book rather than something that enhances your ability to write.

And I think that NaNoWriMo is good for science fiction writers in that sense that it’s kind of like “Okay, enough planning. It’s time to take this show on the road and actually get your story written.” And I think that’s also true for writing historical fiction. They get caught in that same infinite research loop where you really can take a century to try to map out the exact kind of wunderbust that your character would be carrying or whether the buttons on their pants would be made of elephant tusk or brass. And I think in some ways that sort of hides the point of the story. You don’t necessarily need to know how that creature breathes or something.

It sounds like a lot of people use research as a procrastination tool, or an excuse not to write the novel.

For me, what I have found is that it’s better to just go ahead and write the thing, and get the plot down and get your character arcs going, and figure out who’s going to be in the story, and get a general sense of where it’s going to be set, and know that a novel is something that goes through drafts. There’s really no way of getting around it. No matter how talented you are as a writer, you cannot get your novel right on the first draft. You just can’t do it. It’s too complicated. And so I think with that in mind, I would encourage people to go ahead and write the story with whatever worlds they can get open at the time. And then go through and see what parts of the story are the best parts. And then on your second draft build your book around those. And who knows? Maybe a lot of that intricate world and entire solar system that you would have spent a year creating, maybe it turns out it’s not even a hit in that book. So at that point, it would have been a lot of wasted time.

One of the things I really like about NaNoWriMo is this community you’ve set up. You have these block captains who keep everyone in line. And there’s this wonderful sense of – and I mean this in the best way possible – sense of shame in the community, shaming you to keep writing.

Yeah, absolutely. I think we’re really in some ways kind of a cross between a marathon and a literary block party or something where having that community is really important. And I think it does such great things for both the writing and the writer in that none of us are getting paid to write these novels and because of that it can be really hard to make time for them. There’s so many things that take precedence in our lives, things that pay the rent and the mortgages, and things that allow us to send our kids to school and all that stuff. Novels tend to be very far down on the list of crucial life undertakings and because of that I think you need to you need anything that helps force you to sit down when you are not feeling it I think is absolutely crucial in getting the book written. And I think this aspect of word count and then this community of people who are going to ask you about, well, how are you doing? Are you at 35,000 words? And you have 13,000 words.

And I think that does help you keep your feet to the fire and kind of gives you the motivation that you need to struggle through the ups and downs of a first draft. And it can be really challenging even for professional novelists that have done this a lot and know there is always light at the end of the tunnel if you just keep on writing. And there are just dispiriting, demoralizing moments where you just think, “What the hell am I doing? I’m a horrible writer. This is the worst story I’ve ever come up with. I should just bury this thing in the back yard and be done with it.” But you find if you keep going through those periods that actually things get better and stories start to come alive and characters take the book in unexpected directions and it all works out. But if don’t have a group of people to help push you through those tough times, it’s just very, very easy to quit. And for that reason, I think this idea of having local chapters all around the world where you can actually bring your laptop or a legal pad or whatever and sit in a coffee shop with folks that you may or may not know and just write your novel I think is just such an essential productivity tool for amateur novelists.

Do you find then that there’s a lot of cross-pollination among the genres? Does physical presence matter more than a close alignment in what you’re writing?

Yeah, that is kind of a nice thing about it. And another nice thing about it is that a lot of people have been doing this every November for six, seven, eight, nine years. And at a certain point people who maybe started out as a scifi writer, after they’ve written four scifi novels and November’s coming up again and they definitely want to do it again, I think it kind of helps push you outside of the typical genre that you might normally read and explore some other things. I know for me, I started writing Nick Hornby-esque music nerd with relationship problems-style fiction and you can only write so many of those before you start wondering what else is out there. And I’ve written a couple of young adult novels that I’ve really enjoyed and I wrote an aquatic zombie lawyer novel. You just kind of get curious and I think that’s a great thing to explore the outer reaches of your imagination.

Um, is that aquatic zombie lawyer novel available somewhere?

It’s available only on my hard drive to a very select readership.

What would you say to NaNoWriMo writers who are now several days into the month, and the high has worn off, and now they’re stuck?

I would just say that this is part of it. This is a time when this idea that seemed kind of fun and a little bit silly is going to start feeling like work and a lot of this self-doubt about our abilities as writers are going to creep in about now. And it’s also a time when a lot of cool, just crazy things start to happen in peoples’ lives, like this is when hard drives start exploding and people get hit by cars. It really is a strange anti-vortex that perhaps is channeled by NaNoWriMo. But a lot of crazy things happen in peoples’ lives that make focusing on your book tough. So I would just say just keep going and know that it will get better in week three and that if you keep going into week four that it just feels like the greatest thing you could ever imagine. It’s just really an exhilarating feeling.

Did you deliberately choose the worst possible month to do this?

You know, the first year we did it, we did it in July. And it was tough for other reasons, because everyone was on vacation. And so we would have done it the next July though, but it turned out that the original group wasn’t available. People were just too busy. So we moved it to November. And I think that it’s nice in some ways because a lot of the world is having really miserable weather. Also, November starts with N-O-V, which is kind of a mnemonic to help you think about “Oh, it’s November! I should be thinking nov-el.” And I think that’s a kind of psychic aid. And then, it’s also an absolutely miserable month for any student or teacher. It’s a really hectic time. But it’s easier to get something done when you’re incredibly busy. When you’ve got a million things to do, adding number million-and-one is somehow more doable than when you don’t really have stuff to do and then somehow it’s hard to get anything done. So it’s a horrible month, but there aren’t really any good months, so I think this one’s pretty okay…

What’s interesting is there are a lot of high school students that do NaNoWriMo – a lot of high school students. And I was never more sleep-deprived and exhausted than I was in high school. You have to get up at some ungodly hour and you just have way too many things going on. And that to me is so inspiring that this large of group of teens are basically like, “I’m going to do this. I’m writing my novel.” And I think it’s just great.

So what are you working on this month?

I’m back to square one, but now it’s thirty-something music nerd with relationship problems. So I’ve grown a lot in the last ten years.

Top image courtesy of NaNoWriMo.

[National Novel Writing Month]

The key to handling complicated scientific discussions, says Rohn, is to know the difference between jargon that's not intended to be comprehensible, and "necessary information — things the reader does have to take on board." Incomprehensible jargon "can enrich the atmosphere without impinging on pace," if you make it clear to the readers that they're not supposed to understand it. It's sort of like texture, or extra scenery.

So how do you deal with the bits of scientific explanation that are important to your story, and which your readers must understand? Rohn has a few suggestions. First of all, gloss over the details. Just because you've exhaustively studied every aspect of a scientific issue doesn't mean you have to share it all with your readers. Secondly, work in scientific explanation in between bits of dialog, and present it in a way that will make sense to lay readers. But include enough detail that people to allow people with a scientific background to understand what's going on.

A good lab lit novel should take lessons from The Simpsons, which does an amazing job of appealing both to children and adults simultaneously. The kids love the slapstick humor and mad capers, while the adults get a secret kick out of all the sexual innuendo and obscure pop culture references. Do you remember the episode in which Homer finds himself in a windswept row of aircraft hangers? Inserted into the plot is a two-second mini-scene that you might easily look away and miss. Homer passes a hangar door marked ‘18’. When the door is opened, we see an alien pursuing a crazed-looking official who blurts out, Look out, he’s got his probe! I am sure most children wouldn’t know what to make of it, or understand why their parents were collapsing in hilarity, but it’s so quick and zany that they take it in stride. The story is enriched without impinging on the basic plot. In a similar way, lab lit authors who play to both laypeople and specialists can create a two-level experience that will expand a work of fiction’s appeal.

Experimental Heart is about a biotech researcher, Andy, who meets an intriguing and lovely vaccine researcher, Gina, who's struggling with animal rights protestors and financial problems. After he spends time with her, his monotonous life begins to unravel and he realizes there's more to life than work. But when she disappears, he decides to find out what happen to her, and whether her vaccine really is the amazing breakthrough she claimed.

[Nature]

Here are the details of the MedGadget contest: stories should be between 250 and 2500 words. Entries should be in plain text, in English, and work-safe, since they'll be published on the MedGadget site. Entries will be blinded, meaning the judges won't know your identity. The winner gets published at MedGadget, plus a free Palm Tungsten E2 handheld computer loaded with Epocrates medical software. You also get a complete set of the Lemony Snicket Series Of Unfortunate Events books, to help console you if you accidentally kill one of your patients. A few runners up also get published at MedGadget. You only have until Nov. 16, so get cracking! Virtual medicine images by M. Spencer Green/Associated Press.

[MedGadget]

The crux of Stross's argument is that it takes so long for a novel, or even a work of short fiction, to reach publication that, by the time it's published, many of the assumptions or hypotheses the author made while writing it are already incorrect. Hence, the work is dated before anyone gets a chance to read it. He uses events in the past few years to illustrate his point, inviting us to imagine how we might have envisioned a 2019 United States in pre-Katrina 2006, then how we might have envisioned it in pre-fiscal crisis 2007, and how we would imagine it today:

Now extend the thought-experiment back to 1996 and 1986. Your future-USA in the 1986 scenario almost certainly faced a strong USSR in 2019, because the idea that a 70 year old Adversary could fall apart in a matter of months, like a paper tiger left out in a rain storm, simply boggles the mind. It's preposterous; it doesn't fit with our outlook on the way history works. (And besides, we SF writers are lazy and we find it convenient to rely on clichés — for example, good guys in white hats facing off against bad guys in black hats. Which is silly — in their own head, nobody is a bad guy — but it makes life easy for lazy writers.) The future-USA you dreamed up in 1996 probably had the internet (it had been around in 1986, in embryonic form, the stomping ground of academics and computer industry specialists, but few SF writers had even heard of it, much less used it) and no cold war; it would in many ways be more accurate than the future-USA predicted in 1986. But would it have a monumental fiscal collapse, on the same scale as 1929? Would it have Taikonauts space-walking overhead while the chairman of the Federal Reserve is on his knees? Would it have more mobile phones than people, a revenant remilitarized Russia, and global warming?

Stross concludes on the disheartening note that if the current fiscal crisis results in too much upheaval in the U.S. and E.U., his next novel (a follow-up to his near-future Halting State, set in the year 2023) will already be so dated that he will have to market it as fantasy. Can you even guarantee the U.S.A. and E.U. will still exist in 2023? Stross's complaints may provide an argument for more direct writer to consumer distribution, but it also suggests that speculative fiction somehow fails unless it is predictive of an actual possible future. Yesterday's speculative fiction may be today's alternate history, but it can still inform the way we examine the world we do end up living in.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Living through Interesting Times [via Reddit]

Christina Galante of the Echo Park Time Travel Mart writes to say:

826LA and the Echo Park Time Travel Mart are proud to premiere a collection of five original travel posters by Los Angeles based artist Amy Martin. Each poster advertises a vacation destination in the far past or distant future, transforming the predictable aesthetic of the travel poster with ironic sloganeering such as "Life is Bigger in Pangaea" and "Enjoy Tokyo 2.0" coupled with clean, retro graphic design.

They are on sale now online or at the Echo Park Time Travel Mart at 1714 W. Sunset Blvd in Los Angeles, CA. Posters are $19.99, with $10 off if you buy em all. All proceeds go to 826LA, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching students ages 6 - 18 creative and expository writing, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write.

You can see more of Amy Martin's work on her Flickr page.

Images by Goodnight London.

Extrapolate from current trends...

Certain things happening now will probably carry on, and even accelerate, over the next two decades. The icecaps will keep melting, natural disasters will probably come more often, and droughts may affect more regions. Rich countries will become fortresses of the elderly, with fewer young people who aren't immigrants. Corporations will probably keep becoming more powerful and diversified, unless the next economic meltdown actually weakens their power somehow. There will be less oil, and more fighting over oil. Food prices will keep going up for third-world countries. China and India will be economically resurgent, unless they fuck up. Some forms of social deviance will be marginally more accepted, within wealthy societies at least.

...but don't be their bitch.

Don't assume that every current trend will continue in a straight line — it's never worked that way in the past, and it's unlikely to start now. New technologies will help stem some of the negative trends we're dealing with right now. And unimaginable disasters will spark new cycles of misery that will sweep us all down. Nobody in 1988 could have predicted 9/11 or the girl who hanged herself because her MySpace friends turned out to be mean grownups. (How would you even explain the "MySpace hoax" to someone in 1988?)

The technologies of tomorrow already exist.

Nanotechnology is already turning up in socks and medical devices, and everyone's predicting it'll replace basic circuitry and lead to miracle cures within a few years. People are already chuffed about home robotics, and robots are already helping us fight our wars. There's a lot of talk about amazing replacement limbs that will use nanotech, and even be able to interpret signals from your brain. And there's a lot of reason to be optimistic about gene therapy.

Don't just pick one technology to update.

One of my pet peeves is the near-ish future story where everything's more or less the same, except that there's one miraculous new technology that is transforming the world. It's way more likely that there'll be half a dozen semi-miraculous technologies that will be nudging the world in different directions. (And we can't discount the possibility that things will go to shit so badly that none of those amazing new technologies will come to fruition.)

The story comes first.

We're not writing a white paper here, we're creating LITERATURE. (And yes, it has to be all in block caps, because that's how you know it's serious. John Updike agrees with me.) It's impossible to be "accurate" in depicting the future unless you're a precog or a time-traveler. So the second most important thing is to create a future that's fully alienating and puts the right amount of future-shock on your reader's sushi-like bits. The most important thing is to have it all be in the service of your story, so that all the little details bolster your character and help make the characters' actions seem plausible in context.

So here are a couple of near-future writing exercises.

Writing exercise #1

Let's take a fictional character, we'll call her Betty January, and she has some kind of future job. Like she'll wipe an hour of your life out of the corporate transaction/surveillance databases, or she'll hack your new nanotech/biotech artificial limb to get around the DRM that prevents it from playing the piano like Stevie Wonder. Whatever.

So here's your exercise: Betty goes on a date, with some guy she met online. And it's a really, really bad date. The guy is a pompous dung-wad, and he keeps asking her annoying questions about what she does for a living. Describe Betty's bad date in detail, including how she traveled to the restaurant, what kind of food and drink they have, and what the guy is lecturing her about. Think about details, like how farming might be different in twenty years, or how ettiquette might change if everybody's got internet-enabled crap implanted in their heads. What are cosmetics like in a nanotech/biotech era? But all of the details shouldn't just be random world-buildy lego blocks — they should all be in the service of building the mood of Betty's bad date. And then, as a side effect of portraying her shitty night out, give us a dose of culture shock. (Feel free to post your writing exercise in the comments, if you don't mind random people critiquing it.)

Writing exercise #2

Everything goes to shit. Now that you've done a night-in-the-life type exercise, try writing the day when Betty's world falls apart. You never notice a lot of the technology around you until it fails, so some kind of technical failure should be part of this scenario — but not necessarily all of it. Maybe some corporation finds out what Betty's been up to and has her fire-walled. So suddenly her internet access doesn't work, and her extra arm, unable to download updates, starts turning into dead weight attached to her side. (She doesn't have to have an extra arm, I just threw that in there.) Or maybe there's a natural disaster, like an earthquake, which takes out the phone lines and cellphone towers. The main thing is, write the first five or ten minutes after Betty's world falls apart and everything stops working the way it should. What's the worst she imagines? What desperate measures does she try to get things working again? What does her living space look like to her when she's freaking out and feeling unsafe?

(The image above comes from William Shatner's reality TV show Invasion Iowa, which staged an "alien wedding" in an Iowa church.)

It's interesting that the current flavor of the month in science fiction TV is Battlestar Galactica, which is all about a clash between two religions rather than religion vs. atheism or humanism.

I haven't read any written science fiction in ages that shows a super-scientific culture squaring off with a super-religious one... except maybe Iain Banks' "Culture" novels, where the scientific, humanistic Culture often squares off against a more religious and traditional civilization. Also, many TV shows — especially Doctor Who — frequently feature religious cultures that have created a kind of "cargo cult" around a piece of half-forgotten technology, and in the case of Doctor Who's "Meglos," the hyper-religious Deions (cute name) are opposed by the hyper-scientific Savants.

The tricky part of creating a future history of religion coming into conflict with science is not stereotyping either side. Especially if you happen to be an atheist or opposed to organized religion yourself. The best handling of religion I've seen in a science fiction book was in Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow — where the Jesuits were intimately involved with space exploration, so there was no conflict.

So here are some ideas — I hesitate to call them rules — for creating a future narrative of science clashing with religion:

Find the flashpoint. What's the specific issue that causes tensions to rise between the scientific and religious worldviews? It could be the rise of a more dogmatic strain of fundamentalism, similar to the rise of the Religious Right in the U.S. of the 1980s and early 1990s. But it's probably likely to be some new scientific advance, instead. Something like stem cell research, but more inflammatory. Raising people from the dead, without Jesus? A new kind of nonpolluting car engine that harnesses your orgone energy (by making you have an orgasm while you drive)?

Religious people are technologically sophisticated (unless they're Amish). One of the hilarious things about the portrayal of religious people in cheesy scifi stories is the way they gawk at high-tech items, or start worshipping them. "All hail the mighty Wiimote!", that sort of thing. But you may have noticed that in the real world, religious groups are just as tech-savvy as everybody else who isn't a major geek. They use the Internet for mobilization and outreach, and they're better at using mass media than most secular groups. Think about it this way: has there ever been a useful invention that religious people have refused to use? (Except a few fringe groups.) What would it take for religious people to shun an invention that was genuinely helpful?

Scientific people aren't, as a rule, anti-religion. For every Richard Dawkins, there are tons of scientists and science-zealots who will sort of mumble that studying the wonders of the universe has given them a new appreciation for the possibility that there could be some superior intelligence out there... After all, the existence of a supreme being/first cause/creator is a hypothesis that can be neither proven nor disproven. Even Richard Dawkins admitted that aliens could have "intelligently designed" life on Earth.

Both religion and humanism are fluffy. Most religious people I know are pretty tolerant of other worldviews, and a lot of religious people seem to have only a vague, well-meaning belief in some nebulous (but benevolent) force in the universe. (I'm looking at you, Episcopalians!) Meanwhile, most secular people aren't die-hard pancreas-spitting atheists, but rather humanists, who have a sort of nice, non-threatening belief that people are lovely, and that we're going to keep improving ourselves and getting lovelier. And that eventually, maybe we'll get over our baser instincts and also learn to conquer space.

Atheists can be fanatics too. And then there are the Dawkinses and Christopher Hitchenses of this world, who are just as dogmatic and fundamentalist in their belief that you can prove a negative as the most cross-eyed Cotton Mather wannabe. If a major conflict did strike up between scientific and religious outlooks, it would be as likely to start with the radical atheists as with the radical theists.

Think dystopian. The religious and scientific approaches to the world can coexist reasonably well on a comfy, room-temperature planet with more-or-less adequate resources. But if we see massive ecological disruption in the coming century — as many experts predict — and our planet becomes a much less nice place to live, people will become a lot more desperate. Scientists and religious leaders may have very different ideas on how to handle the wave of disasters and shortages to come — and who's to blame. (Think religious leaders blaming immorality for Hurricane Katrina, for example.) Science, on the other hand, may propose some pretty stringent, if not morally questionable, solutions to the crisis.

I could see the world eventually turning into two blocs: a humanistic superpower that tolerates religion but won't allow it in politics or government, and a quasi-theocracy, where religious leaders hold a lot of sway. Not unlike the Cold War, except the humanistic bloc might be less oppressive than the Soviet Union was. The only real question in my mind is, which of those blocs would the United States align itself with?

According to Fraction, who'll be co-writing the Uncanny X-Men comic with Captain America-killer Ed Brubaker, readers should expect the following new take on the evolutionary-based franchise:

These people were once the future, and now they're standing on the verge of extinction. And they still defend a world that hates and despises them. The ones that believe in tomorrow are running on faith and fighting off doubt. What's to keep them holding on? That crux at the core of all the characters, in all of its different forms, is what we're going to be looking at. There's a wildly new status quo that speaks to the very heart of who the X-Men are, and who they've always been. Facing the end of the mutant genetic line only serves to magnify that.

Oh! And stuff blows up; everybody has lots of sex, and then dies.

Brubaker and Fraction Talk About Uncanny Days To Come [Newsarama]

I wouldn't claim to be an expert on short fiction writing, but I have written over a hundred of the little fuckers, a large proportion of which have been science fiction-y. Here are a bunch of do's and don'ts, that I discovered the hardest way possible.

World-building should be quick and merciless. In a novel, you can spend ten pages explaining how the 29th Galactic Congress established a Peacekeeping Force to regulate the use of interstitial jumpgates, and this Peacekeeping Force evolved over the course of a century to include A.I.s in its command structure, etc. etc. In a short story, you really need to hang your scenery as fast as possible. My friend and mentor d.g.k. goldberg always cited the Heinlein line: "The door dilated," which tells you a lot about the surroundings in three words. Little oblique references to stuff your characters take for granted can go a long way.

Make us believe there's a world beyond your characters' surroundings. Even though you can't spend tons of time on world-building, you have to include enough little touches to make us believe there's stuff we're not seeing. It's like the difference between the fake house-fronts in a cowboy movie and actual houses. We should glimpse little bits of your universe, that don't necessarily relate to your characters' obsessions.

Fuck your characters up. A little. Just like with worldbuilding, you can't necessarily devote pages to your characters' childhoods and what kind of underwear they wear under their boiler suits. Unless your story is really a character study with a bit of a science fiction plot. I used to have a worksheet that included spaces to fill in in info about each character's favorite music, hatiest color, etc. etc. Never filled those out. If I'd tried to force myself to come up with a favorite color for every character, I would have given up writing. But do try to spend a bit of time giving all of your characters some baggage, just enough to make them interesting. Most science fiction readers are interested in characters who solve problems and think positively, but that doesn't mean they can't have some damage.

Dive right in — but don't sign-post your plot in big letters. When I started writing stories, my early efforts meandered around for pages before something happened to one of the characters to make him/her freak out. And then the rest of the story would be the character(s) dealing with that problem. And then, as I got more practiced, I found the foolproof map to awesome storytelling: introduce whatever it was that was freaking out my characters in the very first sentence of the story! And then the story could be about them dealing with that problem, until they solved it in the very end. It was so perfect, how could it fail? It took me another year or two to realize that plunging the characters into the story's main conflict right away was just as boring, in its own way, as the ten pages of wandering in circles. The best short stories I've read are ones which start in the thick of things, but still keep you guessing and let you get to know the characters before you fully comprehend the trouble they're in.

Experiment with form. Short fiction isn't one form, it's a whole bunch of forms jammed together according to their length. Short stories include your standard 3,000 word mini-odyssey thru the psyche. But they also include flash fiction (sometimes defined as under 100 words, sometimes under 500 or even under 1,000.) And those wacky list things that McSweeney's runs sometimes. In fact, for a while there, postmodern short fiction was all about the list, or the footnotes, or the krazy monologue, or the story told in office memos. Try writing super-short stories of only 10 words, or mutant essay-stories written by a fictional person. Also, if you always write third person, try first person. Or if you're always doing first person, try third.

Think beyond genre. Often the best genre fiction is the stuff that cross-germinates. Pretend you're actually writing your story for the New Yorker, and try to channel George Saunders or even Alice Munro. See how far you can go towards writing a pure lit piece while still including some elements of speculation. Or try writing your story as a romance. Or a mystery. Imagine it as a Sundancey indy movie.

Don't confuse your gimmick with your plot. You may have a great idea for a piece of future technology, or some amazing mutation that turns a whole bunch of people into musicvores who survive by eating your memories of rock concerts. Maybe you have the most original basic premise evar — but that's not your plot. Your plot is how your new widget changes the people in your story, and how it affects their lives. Or what decisions your people make as a result of this new technological breakthrough.

Don't fall into the character-based/plot-based dichotomy. People, especially in writing groups and workshops, will try to categorize stories as based on either plot or character. This is a poisonous idea that will turn you into a cannibalistic freak wearing a belt made out of human spinal cords. There's no such thing as a character-based story or a plot-based story, because every story has both. Even the most incident-free Ploughshares romp or the most twisty thumpy space opera tale. If you start thinking that stories can be categorized into either pile, you'll end up writing either eventless character studies or plot-hammer symphonies starring one-dimensional nothings.

Author Dave Eggers of McSweeneys and A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius started 826 Valencia in San Francisco as a tutoring and writing center for students, and they now have locations in New York, Los Angeles, Michigan, Chicago, Boston, and Seattle, with more coming soon. Many of the locations feature themed stores that generate both traffic and money for the non-profit centers: San Francisco has a pirate store, New York has a superhero goods company, Seattle has a space travel supply company, and now Los Angeles has a time travel mart.

You can hit this link for an exhaustive rundown of all the products they sell. We particularly like the Evil Robot Memory Eraser and the Drinkable Languages.

Time Travel Mart [826 LA] (Thanks Alan!)

You've said that optimistic, planet-hopping science fiction leads people to believe we can abuse the Earth as much as we want, because we can just colonize space. Why is that?

Are you sure planet-hopping SF is optimistic? I find a lot of it escapist and genuinely despairing. I'm thinking of commercial SF, say movies like Lost in Space, where a destroyed environment is simply the spur to get us hopping across star systems in search of a beautiful new planet. To me that's a counsel of despair. We'll destroy this planet, it seems to say, so we need to find a nice new one.

An optimist, at least this optimist, feels that reducing carbon output and finding ways to bind it are just the kind of problem that human beings are good at solving. We can and we will strike a balance with the rest of this planet. How good we are at it will determine how many of us will die and how much of our culture we get to take with us.

But most science-fiction fans are often the greenest people around. They all drive hybrids!

I have no doubt your friends are green. They are probably just the people to be able to understand the chemistry behind global warming and to believe that the future can be very different from our comfortable life now. I'm sure they also know that you can't approach the speed of light without time dilation effects and that faster-than-light travel is highly unlikely. And as SF fans, they probably read the better SF novels.

But the better SF novels are not the SF that actually plays a perceptible role in society. The SF that has impact and that performs a powerful social function is media SF. Media SF continually and relentlessly shows large sections of society that it will be easy to fly to new green habitable worlds. This may be the wrong message when there's a strong chance that we only have this one planet.

Isn't it too soon to conclude that planets like Earth are rare in our galaxy?

Of course it's too soon. But it's way too late not to acknowledge that we may not get very far into the galaxy. That will limit the number of Earth-likes within range. The best we can hope for is anti-matter drives that get us up to a good percentage of the speed of light. That puts, by my rough reckoning, a horizon on how far we can get. I'd say about 30 light years at the outside.

And the term "Earth-type planet'' does not mean one in which there is oxygen, abundant water etc. It means a planet that has rock, is likely to be within a range of temperatures and which may have water and has gravity within a certain range. In all likelihood, it means a planet that needs terraforming. Let's consider the cost, difficulty and time needed to terraform Mars. Imagine having to do that across a 20 light year gap. It would make terraforming Mars the better option.

So why does so much science fiction cling to the faster-than-light drive?

Various reasons, many of which simply have to do with ease of storytelling. FTL gets you places faster, saving plot time. Lots of lovely green worlds give you an assortment of exotic locales. It absolutely makes sense to have galaxy busting spacecraft jumping all over the galaxy if all you want to do is write a fun story.

It sounds like you want to tell SF writers to eat their spinach. Is there any way to describe "mundane SF" that stresses the exciting story possibilities instead?

It's only spinach for writers. You have to be original, and there are fewer magic wands to get you out of plot difficulties. But the theory is, that once we get cooking on the new tropes, we'll have new and different futures to show. I'm co-editing the Mundane SF issue of Interzone with Julian Todd, and it does seem that our next step is to stop saying what we don't use, and start to pointing towards the fiction we're aiming at.

That issue has some neat near-future stories and some far-future stories, particularly a good one from Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. It's also got a story from Elisabeth Vonarburg, and work for some relatively new authors as well. One of the stories I wrote for the issue was a far-future Mundane story, which I liked, but it was too long for the issue at 15K.

What topics are you hoping to see mundane SF stories cover?

I'd like to see far- as well as near-future Mundane stories. I'm very hopeful given the range of stories we got for the issue. We did get a lot of climate-change or pandemic stories. But we also got a lot of speculation on the impact of technology on religion, genetics, psychology and psychotherapy. We got sailing stories, closed environment stories, lots of post-cyberpunk stories.

There also seems to be a link between writing mundane and being more concerned with gender issues or material of interest to women. I have no idea why that would be, but it's good to see.

What are some examples of mundane science fiction that you recommend?

Charles Stross' novel Glasshouse is self-identified Mundane. Ken MacLeod's next novel is self-identified mundane. I don't know if it's out in the States, but Anil Menon's first novel The Beast with Nine Billion Feet is mundane SF. The line we take is this: authors aren't mundane but stories are. This leaves authors free to write something else. The only person who can say if its author was playing the mundane game is the author him/herself. So it is kind of fun to spot stories that might have been Mundane, but unless the authors agree, well, it's not Mundane. My own personal might-have-been-Mundane favorite is Gattaca. Also lots of Philip K Dick, Samuel Delaney and J G Ballard.