Science fiction. What does that term actually mean?

Let’s take the last part first. Fiction. That means it’s made up, a story that never happened (or hasn’t happened yet). In theory, no options are off the table. The writer has total freedom, can make up whatever they want.

But good fiction needs to feel real. The characters have to behave in ways that, even if not predictable, are human. When things happen, there has to be some kind of logical reason. When characters use objects, those objects have to behave in reasonable ways.

So what about the ‘science’ part of the name? Science fiction is (usually) centred on some kind of science or technology, or exists in a world where science and technology are important. And that science, no matter how outlandish, needs to make some kind of sense. If it doesn’t, we’re in the realm of magic.

There’s a thin line, though. Take the force in Star Wars. There might have been some attempts to explain this with science, but it acts very much like a magic system. Then consider one of Arthur C Clarke’s ‘laws’ — that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Current Internet technology would seem like magic to someone from a few hundred years ago. So if I’m writing a space opera series set hundreds or thousands of years in the future, there will most likely be technologies that seem like magic, as well as technologies I can’t even begin to imagine.

But I’m writing fiction, and I want readers to enjoy and engage with it. So these technologies need to feel plausible. If the technologies don’t yet exist, I need to write about them in a way that makes them at least seem possible.

This limits that freedom I mentioned earlier. But when it comes to writing, limits can be (are?) important. Have too much freedom, and there are too many possibilities. Setting limits helps focus the mind.

One thing I need to consider in my new series is space travel. I have humanity spreading across the galaxy. That means people need to travel vast distances. Our current understanding says that nothing can travel faster than light, so travel to even the nearest stars would take years, even lifetimes.

There are various ways to deal with this. One is to have passengers on space-going vessels hibernation, with the ship waking them when they near their destination. Another alternative is to have some kind of way of ‘skipping’ through space — hyperspace travel, wormholes, and so on.

I’m going to use the second alternative. I don’t want hyper-drives that can throw craft around the galaxy as easily as they can travel from a moon to its parent planet. That almost feels like cheating. Instead, I’m going to have ‘gates’ in various locations, with the ability (the technology and the science) for anything entering one gate to emerge at another almost instantly, even though the gates are light years apart.

But how did these gates get there? If these gates are some kind of hyper-space doorways, who set the doors in place?

My solution is to have vast generation ships travelling to distant stars. These city-sized ships take lifetimes to make their journeys, and there’s no hibernation. Those who board the ship when it sets off will never see the destination, dying out long before the ship arrives.

As these generation ships cross the void between stars they create and drop off gates, enabling those in their wake to skip across the vast distances.

But what about those who live on these ships? For them, the journey is their life. For them, the ship isn’t a means to an end but a home.

The more I considered this, the more involved the whole thing grew.

If conditions on these generations ships were perfect, then the passengers (or those who call the ship home) wouldn’t want for anything. But is that a good thing? If the purpose of these ships is to seed distant planets, and these planets are going to need work (terraforming) before they can independently sustain human life, then those who colonise these new worlds will need to be tough. They’ll need to be adaptable and strong — physically, mentally and emotionally. People who have existed in an environment that provides all they need would most likely be weak. They’d expect things to work out. They wouldn’t be used to struggle.

So in my series, life on these generation ships will be tough. Some will have it easy, but others will struggle. While the ships won’t want to kill off their passengers (the ‘seeds’ for the new worlds), they won’t make things easy. There will be crime, and pain, and death. The ships will contain environments that force the occupants to push themselves, to adapt and grow.

Which leads to more thoughts. Imagine a generation ship travelling for thousands of years. Now think of how much has changed on Earth in the last millennia. There have been wars and unrest, along with periods of peace. There has been turmoil. How much of this would (could) these generation ships endure?

So it makes sense to have an overseer. But who? Is this a group of people — and if so, would they have the same problems the rest of the passengers have? Or is the controlling force some kind of machine sentience?

And what about the gates? Who controls them? If a gate fails, what happens? Every possible solution to these questions leads to more alternatives.

But I have to think about these things. If I have this gate technology in my series, and if I have these generation ships, then I have to make sure they seem real. I have to consider how their existence would effect people, as individuals and as societies.

And isn’t that one of the fascinating things about science fiction? It enables us to play with possibilities. It enables us to posit these questions, even if we can’t settle on any firm answers.

This is science fiction. It isn’t about fact, but about asking ‘what if…?’ It’s about extrapolating what we currently know and seeing where it might end up.

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