I Should Be Revising but…

My revision is coming along.  I’m pretty pleased with it so far.  And I should be working on that but…

I’ve had a couple of things on my mind recently.  One thing is that I’ve been toying around with creating a tutorial and maybe a program to randomly generate Cultures and Societies.  I’ve been reading a lot of anthropology and sociology recently and there’s some really good stuff in there.  Lots of story ideas based on different types of cultures and societies.

But something else is really bothering me.  I recently read an article about writing and something I read bothered me.  I don’t recall the article offhand.  I don’t remember who wrote it so I can’t refer back to it, but one thing it said bothered me.  And that was that a Science Fiction story has to be about Science and Fantasy stories have to be about magic.  It said that if you write a Science Fiction story then if you remove your science gimmick, the story should fall apart.  For example, if you take the genetic science out of Jurassic Park, you no longer have a story because it no longer makes sense.  You have to have the science in there.  If you take the magical ring out of Lord of the Rings, you no longer have a story.  You have to have the magic in there.

And although I agree when it comes to those examples, I really don’t think that’s necessary.  You can take the space travel and space battle out of Honor Harrington and you’ve still got a story.  You could take Honor Harrington and you could put her into a fantasy setting where the ships are boats instead of spaceships and some of the armament is magical instead of technological, and you could have a pretty killer story.

I’ve been arguing with myself on this with my story about the Princess.  I still debate whether I should take that from a far future setting and place it into a Steampunk or Fantasy setting.  The story could work in either setting.  I could even make it work, with some tweaking, in a modern setting although it would take some hard work to do that.  The reason I can do that is because the story is about the people and not about the stuff around them. 

My princess story is about a spoiled, useless princess who loses her kingdom in a coup and then wins it back after building a ragtag army of pirates and freedom fighters.  It’s not about science.  It’s not about fantasy.  It’s about people.

Another example is a story about an unjustly imprisoned man who breaks out and takes elaborate revenge on those who sent him there.  You can take that story and write it in any setting and at any time.  Dumas did it as The Count of Monte Cristo but you could write that story as a fantasy or a science fiction novel just by placing it in the appropriate setting.  You and I could both take that story and write it and they would both be totally different stories that could both be very good.

Because good science fiction and fantasy stories can be about people and not necessarily about people and their relation to magic or technology.

And honestly, I think you can even divorce the basic Jurassic Park story from science and the Lord of the Rings from fantasy.   You can think of a variety of themes for each of those stories.  For example, you could cast Jurassic Park as a story about how technology (or magic) can get out of control when you don’t respect the nature of it and Lord of the Rings could be a cautionary tale about how excessive power can pervert even the most innocent of people.