McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

Writing near to home with SF and Fantasy

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novium:
it may be harder to write, but it can also be harder to read.

Athanasia:
I can see the point. Definitely. On the other hand, we are lucky to come at a time when sci fi has had decades of books published and read. Unless one wants to depict totally outlandish people in totally outlandish settings (some great writers became cult writers for doing it), one can easily rely on the tools of the genre.

Just for the sake of it ;) I will throw in an argument. Is it really easier to drag your reader into your world if the settings are contemporary and ordinary? Won't you need to work that much more to have them suspend their disbelief and transcend this ordinary place into one of wonder - than if you deliberately set your story 5 centuries hence on a planet of the Alliance?

<<Feel free to kill me - it's easy, nobody wears a personal armour to run their errands, at least not on the central planets. They'll just grow another clone (hopefully I remembered to pay my insurance) and infuse it with my latest memory backup (all hail to Kanri technology, although it's more of a religion to them). Technically, the Alliance laws won't even consider it like murder... more like damaged property. As for me, what can possibly go wrong. >>*L*

I'd say any writer can afford short cuts now because so much has been written. What would bug me would be to create a whole "outlandish" background just for one story, even novel-sized :)

My two cents,

Athanasia

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