An Interview With Ian Benke
Plot: it matters, but not nearly as much as most people think it does. Just make sure each scene is relevant — that is, that it riffs in some meaningful way on your theme — and that it’s honest, with the characters doing things those characters would actually do under the circumstances, as opposed to whatever stupid thing they might do just to move the story along.
Science Fiction and Fantasy are hugely popular genres. What does it take for a writer today, to write compelling and successful Science Fiction and Fantasy stories? Authority Magazine started a new series called “How To Write Compelling Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories”. In this series we are talking to anyone who is a Science Fiction or Fantasy author, or an authority or expert on how to write compelling Science Fiction and Fantasy .
As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Robert J. Sawyer.
Robert J. Sawyer has won the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards for Best Novel of the Year as well as the Robert A. Heinlein and Hal Clement Awards, plus a record-setting 17 Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards (“Auroras”). Rob’s 24 novels include the #1 Locus bestsellers The Oppenheimer Alternative, Quantum Night, Triggers, and Calculating God, plus FlashForward, basis for the ABC TV series of the same name. He was one of the initial nine inductees into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame and is a member of The Order of Canada, his country’s highest honor.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share a story about what first drew you to writing over other forms of storytelling?
The very first science-fiction book I ever read, back when I was 12, was a novel called Trouble on Titan by Alan E. Nourse. My older brother gave me a used paperback he’d acquired somewhere. It began with an essay by Nourse (whose last name was pronounced “Nurse,” and who, ironically, was a medical doctor) entitled “I’ve Never Been There,” about the joys of being a science-fiction writer. In that essay, he encouraged others to give it a try — so from the very first time I read a science-fiction novel, I knew it was something I wanted to do, and indeed was being encouraged to do. I regret that Dr. Nourse passed away without me ever getting a chance to thank him.
You are a successful author. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
You could say that it’s the classic “Three Rs” they teach in elementary school: Reading, ’Riting, and ’Rithmetic.
Reading is the absolute number one. When I used to teach creative writing, the first question I’d ask my students on day one was, “What are you currently reading?” It was always astonishing to find that some of those who professed to want to be writers weren’t actually reading anything. They’d often gotten into science fiction from watching TV shows or movies, and thought they’d try writing the literature without actually reading any of it. Not only should any aspirant science-fiction writer read the classics of the genre, starting with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, through to the major works of Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Herbert, and Le Guin, but they must also read what’s currently selling. It’s astonishing how many science-fiction literature courses at universities end with William Gibson’s Neuromancer or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, books that are almost forty years old now. You’ve got to be up to speed on what’s selling today.
Next, writing. Don’t get sucked into what I call “para-writing” activities: things that make you feel like a writer, but aren’t actually writing. I speak from bitter experience, having wasted enormous time and energy on writers’ associations, including even becoming president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Taking endless courses, reading how-to-write books, going to writers’ conferences — none of those is a substitute for actually sitting down and pounding on the keyboard. Alfred Bester — and if that name doesn’t mean anything to you except as a character on Babylon 5, then you haven’t read the classics of SF — stated what’s come to be known as “the Bester Limit,” which is this: you have to write a million words of garbage before you’ll write your first good word. So, get that practice in starting today.
Finally, arithmetic, by which I mean you’ve got to treat writing as a business. Decide what your metrics of success are. In my presence, one very financially successful writer wondered aloud, “I can understand writers who produce only one book a year; what I don’t understand is, what do they do with the other nine months?” To which my wife replied, “Polish their awards.” For me, quality is what counts: writing books that will get noticed and remembered, and, yes, win awards. But I can also be brutal. For instance, I gave up writing short fiction — which, in the SF field, typically pays five to eight cents per word — seventeen years ago, in 2005, because I was making far more per word writing novels. I only came out of that retirement once, when I was asked to contribute to an anthology that was paying a dollar a word. The bottom line is the bottom line: time is finite; maximize your productivity.
Can you tell us a bit about the interesting or exciting projects you are working on or wish to create? What are your goals for these projects?
Audible approached me to write something original for them, and I’m doing that right now. It’s a new novel called The Downloaded, and Audible will have a six-month exclusive window for a multi-voice production of it before I release it in print and ebook formats. And I’m glad you asked about goals because that’s something too many writers don’t think about. After forty years now as published professional writer, something has to excite me for me to want to undertake it, and what excites me is doing something different from anything I’ve done before. In this case, to take advantage of the audio format, I decided to do a Rashomon-type multiple-first-person-narrator story; there are, in fact, nine narrators for The Downloaded, each a very distinct character and each presenting a very different point of view on the action. I’d never written anything like that before, and so it was a very enjoyable stretching of my literary muscles.
Wonderful. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. Let’s begin with a basic definition so that all of us are on the same page. How do you define sci-fi or fantasy? How is it different from speculative fiction?
Science fiction and fantasy are opposites; they have no meaningful overlap in carefully written works. Science fiction is about things that plausibly might happen; fantasy is about things that never could happen. That said, my own definition is this: Science fiction is the mainstream literature of a plausible alternative reality. That is to say that its central storytelling conceit is that the reader is already familiar with the milieu of the story, and so the background is woven in subtly, rather than in expository dumps — and, yes, this makes the “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away …” opening of Star Wars and its infodump beginning text crawl squarely a work of fantasy, not science fiction; Star Wars is fantasy cosplaying as SF.
As for “speculative fiction,” here in Canada, it’s an obfuscatory term used by academics who study science fiction but fear that admitting that will cost them tenure and by writers trying to get government arts-council grants, knowing from experience that such bodies, and in particular the national Canada Council for the Arts, simply won’t fund you if you use the words “science fiction” in your application. I defy you to find a “speculative fiction” section in a bookstore anywhere, and you’ll note that none of the major American print magazines in the field use that term in their titles: Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
It seems that despite countless changes in media and communication technologies, novels and written fiction always survive, and as the rate of change increases with technology, written sci-fi becomes more popular. Why do you think that is?
Oh, how I wish I could agree with you that written science fiction is becoming more popular! But it just isn’t. Sales of it are in the toilet; the worst they’ve ever been. I was talking to my New York literary agent a few days ago, and he was lamenting just how difficult it is to place, let alone get decent money for, science fiction out of the big-five New York publishers anymore. Now, fantasy — that’s quite literally a different story; it’s doing fine. But science fiction? Well, Baen Books is doing well with a very narrow kind of SF, military space opera. But aside from them, the landscape is dismal. One friend of mine, published by one of the major New York science-fiction and fantasy publishers, just got told by his editor that the third book in his trilogy, the first two volumes of which had been highly acclaimed, was only going to be released as an ebook, since the market for printed SF books is just so poor. Another friend — a Hugo winner! — recently got told that his publisher wasn’t going to bother to release the book they’d commissioned from him at all, in any format.
In your opinion, what are the benefits to reading sci-fi, and how do they compare to watching sci-fi on film and television?
Good, literate, intelligent science fiction is about ideas; much — but, thankfully not all — science-fiction film and television is just about spectacle and escapism. Reading SF makes you think, and, indeed, it often inspires young folk to go into science and engineering careers; in fact, the government of China, a country I visit often, goes to great lengths to encourage the reading of science fiction for precisely that reason. As the late Canadian-born science-fiction writer Gordon R. Dickson said, “Science fiction didn’t make the moon landing, but we made the people who made the moon landing.”
What authors and artists, dead or alive, inspired you to write?
Paul W. Fairman! Now, that’s a name only real die-hard SF historians will know, but he ghostwrote one of the first SF novels I ever read, The Runaway Robot, which was credited to Lester del Rey. It’s a YA novel, and is a spectacular first-person work about emergent artificial intelligence, which became one of my own recurring themes (most notably in Wake, Watch, and Wonder), plus it’s just utterly charming. Also, Oliver Butterworth, who wrote a putatively middle-grade novel called The Enormous Egg, which is a wonderful satire about academia, small-town life, and Madison Avenue. But it’s also a science-fiction novel set in the present day in which one of the main characters is a paleontologist; my own novel Calculating God, which shares those traits, owes its existence to Butterworth.
If you could ask your favourite Science Fiction and Fantasy author a question, what would it be?
The professional science-fiction writing community is small, and I’ve actually met and talked with most of my idols, including Isaac Asimov and Frederik Pohl. But the one I never met is actually my all-time favorite: Arthur C. Clarke (although I did get a nice postcard from him once!). Sadly, of course, he’s passed away, but if I could ask him a question still, it would be: “Were you really serious when you said, `Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic?’” That’s come to be known as Clarke’s Third Law, and it’s sadly used as a get-out-of-jail-free card for a lot of sloppy writing.
We’d like to learn more about your writing. How would you describe yourself as an author? Can you please share a specific passage that you think exemplifies your style?
I mostly write present-day, philosophically rich, thematically driven, hard science fiction, usually set in my native Canada with culturally diverse scientists or academics as main characters; I strive to combine the intimately human with the grandly cosmic. The opening of my twenty-third novel Quantum Night, which won Canada’s Aurora Award for best SF/F novel of the year, is typical of my work:
The call had come just about a year ago. “Hello?” I’d said into the black handset of my office phone.
“Professor James Marchuk?”
I swung my feet up on my reddish-brown desk and leaned back. “Speaking.”
“My name is Juan Garcia. I’m part of the defense team for Devin Becker, one of the Savannah Prison guards.”
I thought about saying, “Well, you’ve got your work cut out for you,” but instead simply prodded him to go on. “Yes?”
“My firm would like to engage you as an expert witness in Mr. Becker’s trial. The prosecution is seeking the death penalty. We’re likely to lose on the facts — the security-camera video is damning as hell — but we can at least keep Becker from being executed if we get the jury to agree that he couldn’t help himself.”
I frowned. “And you think he couldn’t because …?”
“Because he’s a psychopath. You said it in your blog entry on Leopold and Loeb: you can’t execute someone for being who they are.”
I nodded although Garcia couldn’t see it. In 1924, two wealthy university students, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, had killed a boy just for kicks. Leopold considered himself and Loeb to be exemplars of Nietzsche’s Übermenschen and thus exempt from laws governing ordinary men. Supermen they weren’t, but psychopaths they surely were. Their parents engaged none other than Clarence Darrow to represent them. In a stunning twelve-hour-long closing argument, Darrow made the same defense Garcia was apparently now contemplating: claiming Becker couldn’t be executed for doing what his nature dictated he do.
I took my feet off the desk and leaned forward. “And is Becker a psychopath?” I asked.
“That’s the problem, Professor Marchuk,” said Garcia. “The D.A. had a Hare assessment done, which scored Becker at seventeen — way below what’s required for psychopathy. But we think their assessor is wrong; our guy squeaks him into psychopathy with a score of thirty-one. And, well, with your new procedure, we can prove to the jury that our score is the right one.”
“You know my test has never been accepted in a court of law?”
“I’m aware of that, Professor. I’m also aware that no one has even tried to introduce it into evidence yet. But I’ve got your paper in Nature Neuroscience right here. That it was published in such a prestigious, peer-reviewed journal gets our foot in the door; Georgia follows the Daubert standard for admissibility. But we need you — you personally, the lead author on the paper — to use your technique on Becker and testify about the results if we’ve got any chance of having the court accept the evidence.”
“What if I show that Becker isn’t a psychopath?”
“Then we’ll still pay you for your time.”
“And bury the results?”
“Professor, we’re confident of the outcome.”
It sounded worthwhile — but so was what I did here. “I have a busy teaching schedule, and — ”
“I know you do, Professor. In fact, I’m looking at it right now on your university’s website. But the trial probably won’t come up until you’re on summer break, and, frankly, this is a chance to make a difference. I’ve read your Reasonably Moral blog. You’re against the death penalty; well, here’s a chance to help prevent someone from being executed.”
My computer happened to be displaying the lesson plan for that afternoon’s moral-psych class, in which I was planning to cite the study of Princeton seminary students who, while rushing to give a presentation on the parable of the Good Samaritan, passed by a man slumped over in an alleyway, ignoring him because they were in a hurry.
Practice what you teach, I always say. “All right. Count me in.”
Based on your own experience and success, what are the “Five Things You Need To Write Compelling Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories?” If you can, please share a story or example for each.
- Research! Tons of it. For my latest novel, The Oppenheimer Alternative, I spent more than a year of full-time work doing the research for it. I go into the research phase with no preconceptions, but with my eyes wide open, looking for things that would be exciting to dramatize and trying to figure out my theme.
- I have to know my thematic statement in advance — what it is, at the highest level, that I’m trying to say. For Quantum Night, for instance, that was “the most pernicious lie humanity has ever told itself is that you can’t change human nature.” For The Oppenheimer Alternative, it’s “the world would be a better place if the smartest people in it stopped making the things the stupidest people want them to make.” Once I have that in place, I set upon my journey, discovering the story as I go.
- An interesting character. Not necessarily a likable one, not even necessarily a relatable one, but an interesting one. The best example of a complex main character in all of science fiction is Robinette Broadhead in Frederik Pohl’s Hugo and Nebula Award-winning Gateway, which is told as flashbacks during Broadhead’s psychoanalytic sessions with a computerized shrink. He’s not at all likable, but, wow, is he ever fascinating.
- Plot: it matters, but not nearly as much as most people think it does. Just make sure each scene is relevant — that is, that it riffs in some meaningful way on your theme — and that it’s honest, with the characters doing things those characters would actually do under the circumstances, as opposed to whatever stupid thing they might do just to move the story along.
- A satisfying ending. One good way is the method Arthur C. Clarke recommended (and that he used in both 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous with Rama): finish the book by opening up a whole new vista that lets the readers write the sequel in their own minds.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Entertainment, Business, VC funding, and Sports read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we both tag them 🙂
Alex Kurtzman, the showrunner of all things Star Trek! I was born to write for that franchise!
How can our readers further follow your work online?
I’m on Twitter (@RobertJSawyer), Facebook, and Patreon. I was also the first science-fiction writer in the world to have a website (which is how I scored such a memorable URL), and it has over a million words of content, including tons of writing advice: https://sfwriter.com.
Thank you for these excellent insights, and we greatly appreciate the time you spent. We wish you continued success.
Author Robert J Sawyer On How To Create Compelling Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.