Is the line between science fiction a bit blurry?
I think reality is the one thing that is most critical to science fiction. If you don’t have something real in the story, then you are missing the science part. But the key to that particular treasure chest is in how you mix the reality, also known to some as the truth, with the story, also known to some as the pack of lies. So let me tell you a lie–er–a story about how I tried to build some reality into my little work of science fiction.
1990 was not the year I had the inspiration for the story. That actually came much earlier, in my misspent youth back In the 1970’s. Now, I won’t try to tell you that I had any close encounters of the third kind back then other than in a movie theater, because after all, some lies are too big and hairy for even me to believe. The movie theater had a huge influence on my imagination, as did the Saturday matinees on the television, but the only true parts of that whole mess is how people think and feel in reaction to certain situations.
I could claim a kinship with Davalon and the fact that he was accidentally left behind on Earth because I was accidentally separated from my family at the Mason City Air Show. I know the Mason City Airport isn’t a very big one to get lost in, but there were lots of people there, and I was a dumb kid at the time. I could draw on that wonderful mix of panic, fear, and exhilaration at being completely on my own to help me plot out how a lost alien child would think and act in a small Iowa town. Naturally he would immediately get himself run over on the highway. That’s how it works, isn’t it? Oh, wait, I didn’t actually get run over at the Mason City Airport. That’s one of the big white lies I am trying to separate from truth here.
1990 is significant enough to use as the first word in a paragraph twice because that was the year of both Voyager 2 flying out into the outer darkness after having encountered and photographed the huge gas planets Uranus and Neptune, and the year that a real invasion occurred when Iraq decided to invade Kuwait. Both of those events get an obscure reference in my story because real events, even events that most people try to ignore, can make a pack of lies, er, story seem real.
Everyone has a Ms. Rubelmacher–inspirational by default
1990 is also the year I sat down at my electric typewriter and began pecking away at my first draft of the story itself. 1990 is also the year that happened 101 years after the events in 1889, when Theofrastus Wallace and Thornapple Seabreez flew a passenger train with Pullman coaches all the way to Mars. Of course, that last bit is totally irrelevant because it didn’t actually happen. It is just another pack of lies–er—story that I chose to tell as a screwy plot device to mix up the lies further and make the whole project murky at best.
So… Oops, wasn’t this paragraph supposed to start with 1990 also? I guess not, because it’s all about how you have to use some real science to get your sticky little hands on a label of science fiction for your story. Here you have to make use of all those glorious little facts and details you learned in science class when you were supposed to be paying better attention to what Ms. Rubelmacher was teaching. Here I could place the notion that amphibians absorbed moisture and nutrients through their skin into my story about amphibianoid aliens. I could also use the notion that fusion engines could be fueled by the water droplets in steam, and the imaginary anti-gravity engines were able to make a train fly. I could use my knowledge of Martian Geography to help set part of the story on Mars, again thanks to the fact that Ms. Rubelmacher’s teaching was so boring, er, exciting that I actually had to read ahead in the textbook rather than listen.
So here we have a restatement of my thesis and a summation about all the idiocy, er, wisdom that I have to impart about how you mix what is real with what is a bald-faced lie, er, fictional story. It boils down to this… Any good liar, er, con man, er, story-teller… yes, I mean story-teller, mixes just enough factual and verifiable stuff into the mix to make the lie, er, story believable.
Catch a Falling Star 