The Astral Mirror

by Ben Bova

  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.

  Extrapolation is a carefully worked-out step into the future, a step that is solidly based on known facts. Speculation is a longer leap—often into a much more distant future. But even so, speculation can be based on solid grounds, too.

  Perhaps another word for speculation might be “intuition.” In the early 1940s, when Heinlein was writing the interconnected stories and novels that we now call his Future History Series, he speculated that the United States would put men on the Moon, and then forget about spaceflight for many years; that the period of the 1970s would see such social upheavals that it would be known as “the crazy years;” that a religious dictatorship would rule the U.S. by the end of the twentieth century.

  None of these speculations was taken very seriously; they were merely good story material. There was no basis of fact, in the 1940s, on which to base such speculations.

  But Heinlein had a good feel for the temper of the American people. We reached the Moon, and then more-or-less forgot about it. The ‘70s were marked by tremendous social unrest and personal chaos. And who is to say that the current revival of fundamentalist religious fervor will not lead to a religiously-based government in another decade or two?

  Speculation, when it is based on keen observation of today’s world and an intuitive jump into the future, can help produce realistic science fiction.

  Remember this: When experts make predictions of the future, they are almost invariably wrong, simply because they do not dare speculate freely. Only a science fiction writer can make seemingly wild speculations about the future.

  Urban planners of the 1880s worried about the growing number of horses in our cities; speculative writers “predicted” horseless carriages.

  Military experts of the 1930s built huge fortifications such as the Maginot Line. Science fiction writers were worrying about the use of nuclear weapons and biological warfare.

  Government advisors of the 1950s totally ignored the problems to come from the population explosion; science fiction stories were rife with population explosion problems.

  Today’s experts worry about energy shortages, while science fiction writers demonstrate that there are enormous sources of energy available from solar power satellites, hydrogen fuels, and nuclear fusion.

  Speculation is important to science fiction. But it must be informed speculation, not just wild imaginings. Like the other techniques we have discussed, your speculations must start from a solid grounding in fact.

  Consistency. Every story must be internally consistent. There is no surer way to confuse or exasperate a reader than to produce a story in which the parts do not work together to produce a harmonious, believable whole.

  You couldn’t have an advanced, self-aware computer such as HAL, for example, in a society where there are such energy shortages that people are burning wood to stay warm. You can’t have bathing beauties sunning themselves in bikinis on the sands of Mars. You can’t solve your hero’s problems by suddenly having him discover a magic lamp in the cockpit of his spacecraft.

  Such inconsistencies would jar the reader and put an end to his “suspension of disbelief.”

  Each facet of a story must mesh smoothly with all the other facets. If
you’ll forgive still another reference to my own work, here’s how I used these techniques in my novel, Millennium:

  Characters: the major character is a former astronaut who is now in command of a U.S. base on the Moon. I have lived and worked with military officers, fliers, and astronauts for many years. I know how they think, talk, act. (At least, I think I do!)

  Extrapolation: The U.S. and the Soviet Union have been engaged in a global competition since the end of World War II. If this goes on, I asked myself, when both nations have bases on the Moon, what will happen?

  Research: A good deal of my non-writing work, and most of my leisure time, was taken up by studying everything available on the nature of the Moon and the technologies that would allow people to live and work there.

  Projection: All through history, whenever a colony of any nation has achieved self-sufficiency, that colony has opted for its own independence. So what would happen when the Russian and American bases on the Moon reached physical and economic self-sufficiency? How would they go about obtaining their independence?

  Speculation: I assumed that by the end of this century, we would have permanent self-sufficient bases on the Moon. And laser-armed satellites in orbit around the Earth, ready to shoot down ballistic missiles on command from Washington or Moscow.

  All these factors worked together, reinforced one another, to produce a story that was internally consistent. If any of these factors had been absent, the story would have been weakened considerably.

  There are many kinds of fiction—fantasy, gothic, romance, horror, certain types of detective stories—in which realism is not terribly important. There are even some kinds of science fiction where realism is not vital. But the science fiction that seems to attract the widest audience (and therefore pays best) is the type where realism is necessary.

  It is never easy to write good fiction, of any kind. But it is perfectly possible to write realistic science fiction if you pay honest attention to the techniques we have discussed here. Imagination is all-important, of course. But for good science fiction, imagination must work in tandem with knowledge.

  To Be or Not

  The preceding essay dealt with science fiction and reality. Herewith, four works which treat reality in four different ways: four separate facets of the Astral Mirror, so to speak.

  “To Be Or Not” pokes a little fun at what passes for creativity out in the semi-sacred hills of Hollywood.

  “The Man Who Saw Gunga Din Thirty Times” might not be intelligible, I confess, to anyone who has not seen that motion picture more than once. It is frankly an experimental story, one that shaped itself out of my subconscious as I sat and typed it. Gunga Din, incidentally, is still the best movie Hollywood ever made, the nine-year-old boy inside me keeps on insisting. Cavalry charges, elephants, a temple of gold, villains who are bad, heroes who are good, a great script with terrific lines even for the bad guys, Cary Grant, Victor McLaughlin, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Who could ask for more?

  Lest you sophisticates out there start smirking, let me tell you that a few years ago, as I watched Gunga Din for about the fiftieth time in a theater in urbanely sophisticated Greenwich Village, in the romantic scene in which Doug Fairbanks kisses Joan Fontaine so hard that it knocks her hat off, a sigh arose in that darkened theater from the chic, with-it females that was loud enough to hear across the street.

  The System is a nasty little short-short story, written several years before government agencies started taking the responsibility for deciding who would receive lifesaving kidney dialysis therapy and who would not.

  Cement is a non-fact article, a silly little idea that just might be true. It is a variant on reality that can be published only within the science fiction genre, because the rest of the publishing world is simply not equipped to deal with such ideas.

  Year: 2007 A.D.

  NOBEL PRIZE FOR PHYSICAL ENGINEERING: Albert Robertus Leoh, for application of simultaneity effect to interstellar flight

  OSCAR/EMMY AWARD: Best dramatic film, “The Godfather, Part XXVI”

  PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION: Ernestine Wilson, “The Devil Made Me”

  Al Lubbock and Frank Troy shared an office. Not the largest in Southern California’s entertainment industry, but adequate for their needs. Ankle-deep carpeting. Holographic displays instead of windows. Earthquake-proof building.

  Al looked like a rangy, middle-aged cowboy in his rumpled blue jumpsuit. Frank wore a traditional Wall Street vested suit of golden brown, neat and precise as an accountant’s entry. His handsome face was tanned; his body had the trimness of an inveterate tennis player. Al played tennis, too, but he won games instead of losing weight.

  The walls of their office were covered with plaques and shelves bearing row after row of awards—a glittering array of silver and gold plated statuettes. But as they slumped in the foam chairs behind their double desk, they stared despondently at each other.

  “OF buddy,” Al said, still affecting a Texas drawl, “I’m fresh out of ideas, dammit.”

  “This whole town’s fresh out of ideas,” Frank said sadly.

  “Nobody’s got any creativity anymore.”

  “I’m awfully tired of having to write our own scripts,” Frank said. “You’d think there would be at least one creative writer in this industry.”

  “I haven’t seen a decent script in three years,” Al grumbled.

  “Or a treatment.”

  “An idea, even.” Al reached for one of his nonhallucinogenic cigarettes. It came alight the instant it touched his lips.

  “Do you suppose,” he asked, blowing out blue smoke, “that there’s anything to this squawk about pollution damaging people’s brains?”

  Frowning, Frank reached for the air-circulation control knob on his side of the desk and edged it up a bit. “I don’t know,” he answered.

  “It’d effect the lower income brackets most,” Al said.

  “That is where the writers come from,” Frank admitted slowly.

  For a long moment they sat in gloomy silence.

  “Damn!” Al said at last. “We’ve just got to find some creative writers.”

  “But where?”

  “Maybe we could make a few... you know, clone one of the old-timers who used to be good.”

  Frank shook his head carefully, as if he was afraid of making an emotional investment. “That doesn’t work. Look at the Astaire clone they tried. All it does is fall down a lot.”

  “Well, you can’t raise a tap dancer in a movie studio,” Al said. “They should have known that. It takes more than an exact copy of his genes to make an Astaire. They should have reproduced his environment, too. His whole family. Especially his sister.”

  “And raised him in New York City during World War I?” Frank asked. “You know no one can reproduce a man’s whole childhood environment. It just can’t be done.”

  Al gave a loose-jointed shrug. “Yeah. I guess cloning won’t work. That Brando clone didn’t pan out either.”

  Frank shuddered. “It just huddles in a corner and picks its nose.”

  “But where can we get writers with creative talent?” Al demanded.

  There was no answer.

  Year: 2012 A.D.

  NOVEL PRIZE FOR SCIENCE AND/OR MEDICINE: Jefferson Muhammed X, for developing technique of re-creating fossilized DNA OSCAR/EMMY/TONY AWARD: Best entertainment series, “The Plutonium Hour”

  PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION OR DRAMA: No award

  It was at a party aboard the ITT-MGM orbital station that Al and Frank met the real estate man. The party was floating along in the station’s zero-gravity section, where the women had to wear pants but didn’t need bras. A thousand or so guests drifted around in three dimensions, sucking drinks from plastic globes, making conversation over the piped-in music, standing in midair up, down, or sideways as they pleased.

  The real estate man was a small, owlish-looking youngster of thirty, thirty-five. “Actually, my field is astrophysics,” he told Al and Frank. Bo
th of them looked quite distinguished in iridescent gold formal suits and stylishly graying temples. Yet Al still managed to appear slightly mussed, while Frank’s suit had creases even on the sleeves.

  “Astrophysics, eh?” Al said, with a happy-go-lucky grin. “Gee, way back in college I got my Ph.D. in molecular genetics.”

  “And mine in social psychology,” Frank added. “But there weren’t any jobs for scientists then.”

  “That’s how we became TV producers,” Al said. “There still aren’t any jobs for scientists,” said the astrophysicist-real estate man. “And I know all about the two of you. I looked you up in the IRS Who’s Who. That’s why I inveigled my way into this party. I just had to meet you both.”

  Frank shot Al a worried glance.

  “You know the Heinlein Drive has opened the stars to humankind,” asked the astro-realtor rhetorically. “This means whole new worlds are available to colonize. It’s the biggest opportunity since the Louisiana Purchase. Dozens of new Earthlike planets, unoccupied, uninhabited, pristine! Ours for the taking!”

  “For a few billion dollars apiece,” Frank said.

  “That’s small potatoes for a whole world!”

  Al shook his head, a motion that made his whole weightless body start swaying. “Look fella... we’re TV producers, not land barons. Our big problem is finding creative writers.”

  The little man clung to Al tenaciously. “But you’d have a whole new world out there! A fresh, clean, unspoiled new world!”

  “Wait a minute,” Frank said. “Psychologically... maybe a new world is what we need to develop new writers.”

  “Sure,” the astro-realtor agreed.

  A gleam lit Al’s eye. “The hell with new writers. How about re-creating old writers?”

  “Like Schulberg?”

  “Like Shakespeare.”

  Year: 2037 A.D.

  NOBEL PRIZE FOR SCI-MED: Cobber McSwayne, for determining optimal termination time for geriatrics patients

  OSCAR/EMMY/TONY/HUGO/EDGAR/ET AL. AWARD: The California Earthquake