Setting the scene - the innocent abroad
I've been continuing with my short story rewrite this week. I came across one story that made me think about how we introduce our settings in science fiction.
That story is essentially a murder mystery, with the setting a weather control platform in space. So the setting was unfamiliar to the reader, and so was the work done on that platform. And since both are essential to the story, it was important that they were described for the reader.
I had started the story with an eight-line section in the viewpoint of the weather platform's security chief. There were several problems with this. The first problem was a common one for SF writers - familiarity of the characters with the unusual setting. If you are the weather control security chief then that platform is your office. The things you see there are everyday to you, and you take it for granted and stop noticing the details which the story requires.
How many of us go around noticing the details of the office we work in every day? We notice the details when we move in there. But once we've been there a while we stop registering those little things. But it's those details an SF writer needs to set the scene in a story.
So if we use such a character to describe our unusual SF setting that's going to come over as forced or false. We might instead opt to do what I had done, and start the story with a total lack of description of the setting. Not a clever solution to the problem.
So how did I solve the problem? The rest of the story was told in the viewpoint of the investigator who had gone up to the weather control platform to investigate the murder, so I switched the story to her viewpoint. This had the advantage of showing the setting through an outsider's eyes. She was what some creative writing teachers call an 'innocent abroad', somebody who knows nothing about the place she is in, and notices everything about it. She helpfully described the platform for the reader.
And her role as an investigator meant she could legitimately ask questions about how the weather platform worked. And that meant such information could be delivered in dialogue, avoiding a tedious info-dump.
Introducing an 'innocent abroad', an outsider who can explain things for the reader, is a very good way of getting across the complexities of a science fictional story setting,
I always think the classic example of this is Arthur Dent. Douglas Adams used the most ordinary sort of person he could think of to provide an audience viewpoint, and to be totally out of his depth most of the time. Perhaps just as importantly, he introduced the 'Hitch-hiker's Guide' to provide the infodumps in an entertaining way so that the listener (and later, reader) didn't get too bored. A double whammy.
ReplyDeleteI think you solved your story problem very well, but I'm curious: what would you have done, if you had not had this 'innocent abroad' character available to you? For example, what if the murder happened on a deep space outpost with a small crew, and with no possibility of visitors, at least within a short time frame?