Another way to do this is with omens. "Beware the Ides of March," a soothsayer warns in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar."
Not that omens have to be ominous. Shakespeare lets an apportion conjured up by fortune-telling witches assure Macbeth he "shall never vanquished be until Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill shall come against him"—which pretty much sounds impossible.
Omens are fun because they can be as vague as needed, while characters' reactions can help drive not only the plot but also character development. Caesar, for example, is too arrogant to take the soothsayer's warning seriously. Macbeth believes his warning... but sees it as reassurance of his invincibility. Then the enemy arrives on his doorstep, camouflaged in branches cut from the forest.
That said, soothsayers and fortune-telling witches aren't common in science fiction (although Doctor Who makes heavy use of cryptic ancient intelligences), but you can do similar things with much more mundane events. The news Martin Smith is listening to on the TV, for example, is a sort-of omen. More explicit is this, another excerpt from the first pages of my story "Neptune's Treasure":
Neptune is an infinity of blues, from pastel to midnight, making you wonder how, back when it was just a dot in a telescope, they'd had the prescience to name it for the god of the sea. [But it also is] a malevolent eye: staring and judging. A god not of jaunty sailing ships but of endless depths, waiting to claim what's rightfully its own.
Then there's the light. The Sun is an actinic dot: still blinding but not the warm glow of in-system. It's a puncture in the fabric of the universe, a glimpse of something even more remote, aloof, and damning than Neptune itself. 5
That's not the most sanguine of descriptions. If I hadn't already said John Pilken was about to die, you wouldn't be caught too much by surprise when he does.
Not that foreshadowing has to presage death, judgment, and destruction. In Star Wars, Han Solo's comment comes as humor, hinting that no matter how bleak it might look at the moment, our heroes will escape. It's "double" foreshadowing. Is something bad about to happen? Of course! Will our heroes escape? Of course, yet again! An even better example of this type of foreshadowing is this passage from the Lord of the Rings: 6
Frodo: "What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature [Gollum], when he had a chance!"
Gandalf: "Pity? It was pity that stayed his hand.... Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.... My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end; and when that comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many—yours not least."
Superficially, this is a moral/philosophical discussion. But when Frodo's will finally falters, we remember it when Gollum's actions, however selfishly intended, not only save Frodo, but all of Middle Earth. The result is an ending that is a surprise, but a surprise that feels right.
"In its simplest form, foreshadowing is establishing the possibility of the story's natural ending," says best-selling fantasy author Carrie Vaughn. "The author plants clues that come together to create the inevitable conclusion."
Chekov's Frammulator
Foreshadowing plays an additional role in science fiction, because science fiction deals with things outside the ordinary reader's experience. In a 1940s thriller, if a shifty-looking character in a fedora comes up behind the hero, sticks a gun in his back, and orders him into a car, we don't need much in the way of explanations. But in Doctor Who, if an Ood approaches with a glowing sphere in its hand, we don't know whether to run or invite it to breakfast.
The same goes for futuristic devices. If a story requires someone to be gruesomely murdered with a molecular inverter, readers need to know what a molecular inverter is, what its normal function is, and how a murderer might lay hands on one. The same goes for any action or technology that may become important late in the story.
"Foreshadowing can help make sure the solution already exists within the story, and gives your reader a chance to solve the problem alongside the characters," says Vaughn. "The least successful episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation are the ones where La Forge or Data stands in Engineering in the last five minutes, and invent a particle no one's ever heard of that suddenly fixes everything."
Not that this is a problem unique to futuristic gadgetry. In his novel Dark Secret, serialized in the April-July/Aug 2013 issues of Analog, Edward M. Lerner had a character who needed to escape from plasticuffs. For that, the character needed to be carrying a penknife. But he couldn't just pull it out of his pocket in an oh-by-the-way-guess-what-I've-got fashion.
Lerner's solution? "I made him a cigar smoker."
At the same time, Lerner couldn't be too obvious. "It's the 'Chekov's gun' principle," he says.
That principle, named for Russian playwright Anton Chekov, holds that if you show a gun in the first act of a play, it must be fired in the third. That's because the moment you show an object as symbolically freighted as a gun, readers will latch onto it, figuring the only reason it's there is to establish it for future action. If it's never used, they'll feel frustrated.
But the same applies to a lot more than guns. If a story opens with a body lying next to a glowing, levitating ball of fire, readers will assume the ball of fire is important. For the same reason, the tachyon drive discussed above damned well better overload, explode, or do something dangerous before the story is over.
Setting such things up without unintentionally telegraphing the end is part of what makes storytelling difficult. One approach is simply to dare the reader to figure it out first. I've done this a time or two, but the best example I can think of is one of Larry Niven's Gil the Arm murder mysteries ("Arm"), which begins with the hero, Gil Hamilton, investigating a locked-room murder in which an apparently long-dead body is lying next to a device that creates a bubble of sped-up time. Clearly, the gadget is part of the crime. But how? Only the sharpest readers will beat Gil to the answer.
Another trick is obfuscation. "Take a tip from magicians," Lerner says, "and go for indirection and misdirection." In the case of his penknife-carrying character, he did this by focusing on the cigar smoking. "I made the cigar habit a window into his personality," Lerner says—"oral fixation, addictive personality." The knife faded into the background.
All of this works more easily for a knife than a molecular inverter. A writer can establish the existence of the knife almost in passing, because readers already know what it is. But if a story has a lot of science fictional gadgetry, it can be hard to distinguish the important ones from those just designed to help produce a futuristic atmosphere. "Science fiction often needs more setting details than mainstream fiction, so it's sometimes hard to tell if the alien lurking in the shadows behind the frammulator is foreshadowing, or just part of the setting," says Analog regular Jerry Oltion. "It's the writer's job to make that clear by way of emphasis, mood, character reaction, or whatever," he adds. "A 'good' writer will make you understand when it's foreshadowing. A great writer will make you remember the detail but dismiss it as unimportant until suddenly it becomes a major plot element later on."
One of my own most successful efforts at this was in William Gleason's and my novella, "Nightfall on the Peak of Eternal Light" ( Analog, Jul/Aug 2012), which hinged on a combination of artificial gravity and solar-power technologies using mirrors high on the rim of a lunar crater.
To introduce each technology, we had one character work on a mirror-building crew, while another attended a low-gee ballet using a floor checker-boarded with artificial-gravity plates. We also made sure our characters were primarily engaged in other activities when encountering each of these technologies. The result was that by the time we needed them, we'd dodged the Chekov's gun problem by making sure both technologies were as integral to the story as the spacesuits the characters wore when working outside.
Some authors do this and other types of foreshadowing del
iberately. Some do them intuitively. Other authors only add foreshadowing details after they've figured out where the story is heading.
"Foreshadowing can make authors look like geniuses," says Oltion. "If we come up with a cool event we didn't anticipate early on, we can go back and foreshadow it. The reader encounters the foreshadowing first, so when they reach the payoff they're likely to think the author came up with it in that order, too."
But however it's done, the basic point is simple. Foreshadowing isn't simply a "literary" device. It's done to keep surprises from being "too" surprising... without tipping them so thoroughly that readers see them coming the proverbial mile away. It's the comedian setting up the punch line... without telegraphing the joke. It's one of the most important but difficult aspects of story writing.
Footnotes:
1 James Broussard, who appears to be attempting to review all former Nebula and Hugo nominees, online. See http://allthenominees.blogspot.com/2013/02/1984-nebula-award-nomineevoid-captains.html
2 All I have read of this out-of-print story is a plot synopsis and the opening pages. But Benford's point is clear: if you reveal the ending early, you have to be very confident that the story's telling will carry the reader through.
3 The reasons the narrator doesn't know her age are complex and irrelevant to the present discussion.
4 www.writersstore.com/techniques-to-establish-pacing.
5 Ellipses omitted.
6 Collected from Wikipedia.
* * *
Digital Ghosts
John F. Keane | 69 words
Your ghost sleeps on your hard drive.
All your vices, all your secrets,
All your conflicts, all your issues,
Always there
Immortal in binary,
Sealed in steel
And eternal megabytes.
Your ghost sleeps in a metal box.
Animals, young, very young;
All your secret passions;
The lizard brain
On digital display
For he who can
And dares.
Your ghost turns on bearings.
Silent secrets tossed on rubbishdumps
Still sleep in tired mechanics;
All you surf and say Is now immortal.
Once, we kept diaries;
Now, metal keeps us.
* * *
Star Song
Kendall Evans | 121 words
Forever together, you and I,
We have occupied
These vast
& asteroid-blasted
Forsaken plains
For aeons
Do you remeber eternity
The long hard struggle
Up from the sea
& taking our tea
On the shoreline
Let us partake of the sacred blood
The wafered flesh
Of the fallen brood
While we discuss the conundrum
Of what is real
& where we've come from
On that journey star-to-star
You were the Captain
I, avatar
In those dark
& Time-dilated
Far reaches
Or were you The ship's A.I.
Dreaming in digital designs
Ancient, wise—
You stroked my neurons;
I was hard-wired
One of us will be A deity
The other diabolic
& let's say you're singular
The only one
I will be legion
Far-star-wandering
Let us make love
In the ruins of ancient
Alien civilizations
Allow our children to prowl
These haunted highways
While howling
At multiple moon-glow
We have gathered
The sub-atomic grains
Of galaxies
Navigated supernova Nebulae
Let's have some fun
This eternity
While we re-conquer the cosmos
* * *
GUEST EDITORIAL SIXTY ASTOUNDING YEARS—
A PERSONAL RETROSPECTIVE Arlan Andrews, Sr. | 1865 words
"Sex, drugs and Rock n' Roll," went the mantra of an earlier generation, to which I always replied, "Well, two out of three ain't bad." I'd usually get a disbelieving look in return, and then say, "No drugs for me—my one addiction is Science Fiction." Which in retrospect turned out to be truer than I ever imagined back then. In reviewing my sixty years as a reader of—and thirty-plus years as a writer for—the magazine edited by John W. Campbell, Jr., Ben Bova, Stan Schmidt, and now Trevor Quachri, I realized that the stories, articles, editorials, and ideas in Astounding/Analog (ASF), and most importantly the playful way of thinking about serious subjects, substantially affected my life. And in doing so, affected others' lives as well. I am certain that other ASF writers and fans will have similar stories; this one is mine.
Books and Covers
I picked up my first issue of Astounding Science Fiction Magazine in a hospital waiting room because its rather sedate cover painting showed a tank-like vehicle fighting a terrific rainstorm. (I had purposely avoided "pulp" magazines with garish covers up till then—BEMs and brass brassieres and all that.) That cover story, Poul Anderson's "The Big Rain," was in the October, 1954 issue—hence the "sixty years" in the title here. In succeeding decades the unfolding of scientific discoveries and technological advances, as well as geopolitical events, have truly been Astounding. But those of us who were science fiction fans, especially ASF readers, have enjoyed much of this wild ride to the future more than most, because (1) we had already read about it, so (2) we expected it, and (3) in large part, we helped bring it about.
Der Alte
As I related in a poetic paean to ASF ("Fantasy of a 50's Fan," Amazing Stories, July 1988), John W. Campbell's editorials were the first thing I would read in each eagerly awaited monthly issue of Astounding. As a budding engineer/scientist/geek/nerd/ "brain" in the mid-1950s, I especially appreciated Mr. C's efforts to get the Scientific Establishment to look seriously at what Charles Fort called "Damned facts"—anomalies, strange and weird phenomena, obscure occurrences, irreproducible results. Among those was the unbelievable Hieronymus "psionic" machine, which, even with its electronic components merely ink printed on paper, could supposedly generate usable information. (In the early 1970s, I was able to interview T. Galen Hieronymus at his home in Toccoa, Georgia, for several hours, hearing even more incredible reports on his career as an early radio pioneer and fringe inventor.) Likewise, the incredible Dean Drive, with its promise of reactionless propulsion, prompted me to send that entire issue to a New Mexico Senator in hopes the government would fund research on it. (Jerry Pournelle has since said that his own investigations of Dean's machine, brought on by those same ASF articles, did not show any promise.) This interest in the unusual led me eventually to serve on the Board of Directors of the Rhine Research Institute of Durham, North Carolina, one of the few professional parapsychological organizations, and to write many articles for Fortean, paranormal, and alternative history publications.
Campbell's basic principles have guided me ever since: first, try to understand the science behind phenomena, but always question authority, search those "dark corners," and look for meaningful exceptions to The Rules. With this attitude, along with libertarian concepts in the stories of Robert A. Heinlein, I often found myself at odds with existing political establishments. So in 1976 I helped found the North Carolina Libertarian party, running as its first gubernatorial candidate that year. (My one and only foray into elective politics.)
My first intended Astounding submission didn't happen. In 1958, after I began working as a missile tracker on a co-op student program at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, I wrote a short semifictional account about Werner von Braun visiting the Range, but was too shy to send it
in. I wish I had. As it was, in 1968 I finally got up the nerve and formally submitted a short story about environmental engineering to Editor Campbell, which he rejected with a polite, typed letter. Later I sent him a parody, "The Engineer's Credo," which poked fun at the then-current anti-scientific types who were criticizing flood control and other "unecological" projects. Mr. C rejected that one, too, this time with a page of harsh criticism. I replied that I was sorry that he had taken it literally; in yet another letter, he came back even harder. Finally in 1971 at Lunacon in New York, Isaac Asimov introduced me to Mr. C, my philosophical godfather. I have a photo from then of Campbell pointing his cigarette holder at my wild Peter Max tie, when he said, "That tie speaks for itself—loudly!" After which I promised him that I would give him one just like it at the WorldCon in Boston that September. Unfortunately, he died a few months later. I still treasure that picture and those severely critical rejection pages.
Ben and Me
I never submitted any fiction to Ben Bova, but he did publish five of my letters from 1972 through 1979 in "Brass Tacks." My favorite was the one where I defended Kelly Freas's illustration of an Amish man giving a middle finger salute (June 1972), which Campbell had commissioned in his final year: "More than any other illustration, this image shows the attitude of John W. Campbell, Jr. toward the Establishment!" (Later, as Editor of Omni, Ben did buy one of my first professional sales.)
Stan, the Man
In 1981 I received a call at my Bell Labs office, asking if I would hold for Dr. Stanley Schmidt. His question endeared him to me forever: "Are you an engineer?" he asked, "Or at least, a scientist?" Within the year, he bought and published "Science, Fiction" (June 1982) and "Glossolalia" (July 1982), followed by twenty-eight more stories and articles over the next thirty years. A few of those bear commenting on. Some may appear to be prescient, but they were just fiction.
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