You, as the writer, can do anything at all, but if it is to be worth doing then it must be possible for you, as the reader—and, hopefully, for other readers too—to approve of it. Some writers are perfectly content with their own approval, but even they probably feel that such contentment smacks of cowardice. Most writers use their own approval as a kind of filter, to sort out that which should enjoy the privilege of not falling prey to the avid DELETE button before the finished product is submitted for the approval of others.
The absolute power that a writer has to determine what happens within a text can begin to seem rather feeble when the need for reader approval is added into the picture. For this reason, writers exist in rather uneasy relationship to their potential readers, particularly to the editors who function as “gatekeepers” regulating the flow of texts into the marketplace. The godlike power of the writer can be abruptly reduced to the severely limited power of a humble servant when the completed text falls upon the desk of an editor. Writers fear editors, and sometimes come perilously close to hating them (which helps to explain why so many editors end up married to writers, at least for a while).
Because writers can do anything at all within the worlds of their texts there is a sense in which anyone who can formulate words can be a writer. Because every act of writing assumes a reader, however, there are all kinds of matters which writers have to bear in mind if they are to make what they write intelligible, interesting and admirable—even to themselves. The first and foremost issue that the writer must consider in making this attempt is plausibility. The world within a text must be designed in such a way that it is acceptable to the reader.
It is often assumed that “plausible” is the same as “believable,” and that “believable” is the same as “possible” but in fantasy and science fiction these equivalences break down. If a story is about events that are supposed to have happened in the ordinary course of affairs in the real world, then the inclusion of events that the reader considers impossible may indeed make the story unacceptable by rendering it unbelievable. When a story is set in an imaginary world, however, it is much harder to decide and define what is and is not believable, within the context of the story.
Even a story that begins in the world familiar to the reader may be modified by the intrusion of some magical object, alien being or new invention. Because such intrusions—which I shall call “novums”—are not ready-made aspects of the familiar world the writer has the freedom to say exactly what they can and cannot do. Even if the novum belongs to a familiar species, it is still adaptable to the writer’s whim. For instance, if you want to write a story featuring a vampire you can decide for yourself how much of the conventional image created by Bram Stoker you want to retain, and how much you want to discard. If you want your vampires to be able to operate in daylight all you have to do is say that they can, and if you want to impose conditions limiting their ability to do so you can make up whatever conditions you like.
Any narrative move that turns a story into fantasy is, in essence, one that deliberately crosses the boundary of accepted possibility. A narrative move that turns a story into science fiction is slightly different, in that the “novum” it introduces will be represented as something that scientific theory establishes as conceivable, but which has not yet been encountered or invented. Introducing such a novum still crosses an important boundary, however, by opening up the question of what might or might not be possible.
Once these kinds of boundaries have been breached, it is no longer sensible to equate plausibility with believability and believability with possibility. Nevertheless, it still makes sense to talk about the plausibility of fantasy and science fiction stories, and about the various features of imaginary worlds to which writers must pay attention if they want their stories to be acceptable to readers. Ideally, of course, we do not simply want to make the worlds within our stories acceptable; we want to make them seductive, or even irresistible—but achieving plausibility is the first step on that road.
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Real and Imaginary Worlds
If it is to be plausible, the world you create within your text needs to be coherent. All the elements of it should fit together into a satisfactory and appealing whole. You must remember that the world of your story is entirely contained within your text; all the things that the reader needs to know about it have to be written into the text and all the things that you write about it ought to be consistent with one another.
Stories that are supposedly set in the real world—including fantasy and science fiction stories in which the real world is supplemented by some kind of novum—have a measure of solidity and internal consistency already built in, “borrowed” from the world with which the writer and reader are already familiar. I shall call these stories “known world stories” in order to distinguish them from stories set in imaginary worlds.
Known world stories have some obvious advantages. If you say that your story is set in London then all the streets and buildings of the actual London—and, for that matter, the rest of the world—will be tacitly present in the world of your story, all neatly laid out and fully functional. Such stories have disadvantages as well; if you borrow your coherency from the real world then you have to be acquainted with all the relevant details of the real world’s coherency. If your characters have to take a train from London to Brighton you will need to know from which railway station trains to Brighton leave, and how to get there on the tube. Cashing in on the coherency of the known world requires research.
The burden of accurate reproduction causes many writers to use imaginary settings even when their stories are set in the known world. The characters in various TV soap operas are firmly located within the greater geography of England but on a local scale they inhabit streets, or even whole boroughs, which cannot be found on maps. The coherency of fiction is, in fact, dependent on not borrowing too much of the coherency of the real world. Giving a detective an address in Baker Street might help him to seem more real, but if he is to be slotted into the reality of Baker Street without actually colliding with the brute facts the address has to be one that does not actually exist.
Stories that are set in the known world can only take this “slotting in” process so far. You can set your story in an imaginary village, town or county without troubling your readers too much, and you can even slot a small country or two into the Middle East or the heart of Africa, but the bigger your invented space is, the greater the pressure it exerts on its borrowed coherency. It used to be easy for writers to insert whole countries like Ruritania and Graustark into the confused map of middle Europe, but it is far more difficult to do so plausibly now that we are so much better informed.
Inventing villages, towns or countries brings practical problems of its own. You can stock them with whatever buildings you like, arranged to suit the convenience of your plot, but you must spell out those arrangements. Moreover, the things you invent must be consistent with the realities you have borrowed; they must be the kinds of things that could exist in the midst of real villages, towns or countries.
While your characters were in London intending to go to Brighton you had the advantage that Victoria station was already “there,” whether you had bothered to mention it or not, and your readers can imagine its presence as a “set” even though you have not described it. On the other hand, when your characters are in Little Drippingham intending to go to Buckhampton, you are obliged to invent the station or bus stop from which they will set out, and this may require a certain amount of descriptive labor if your reader is to be able to picture it as a setting and believe in it as an addendum to the real world.
In fantasy and science fiction stories this kind of narrative labor becomes much more intensive because the settings involved may be much more remote, and the manner in which the imaginary settings “dovetail” with real settings may be much more complicated. Inventing a plausible alien world might require you to gather many kinds of information—geographical, ecological, historical, technological and so on—into a coherent set. This might require considerable cleverness as well as a good deal of research.
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The Art of Extrapolation
Even if you are working with wholly imaginary worlds, the problem of slotting the imaginary into the real still has to be faced. Stories that are set on planets orbiting