On Why I Write Sci-fi

Hello all,

A bit later than usual this week — apologies!! — I’ve got a few projects on the go on at the moment, all very exciting, but it does mean that I’ve been pulled around a bit this week.

Hope you enjoy, and as always thanks for reading!

On Why I Write Sci-fi

During my career I’ve worked in a number of genres: drama, horror, YA, but I do find myself coming back again and again to science fiction.

Sometimes I’m a bit embarrassed when in meetings I’m asked about how I got into it. I’m afraid my answer isn’t very high-brow: I wasn’t watching Tarkovsky or reading Isaac Asimov at the age of four, or anything. The actual truth was that I came to sci-fi through the 6pm slot on BBC Two here in the UK, the world’s greatest time slot according to complex.com. It included such gems as STAR TREK, QUANTUM LEAP, DOCTOR WHO — even the much-maligned SLIDERS.

All of these shows, in their own ways, are in a lineage I think that starts with one of my all-time favourites: THE TWILIGHT ZONE. It’s sci-fi, not just with a social conscience, but also with a focus on character and how a small change in the world that surrounds your protagonist can say something insightful in a real and concrete way about our lives.

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A writer I really respect once said that there were two kinds of sci-fi writers, world builders and metaphor makers. Like Rod Serling, the creator of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, I very much fall into the second bucket. When I write sci-fi, I’m not that much interested in creating strange and expansive realities. I don’t have much time for sketching out what system of currency the alien civilisation uses, or the kind of food they eat on the moon base, or what the space fleet do on their day off.

Where my stories tend to live is much more in a small, sometimes unnoticeable change, the slightest sideways movement from the world we know that could open up something interesting.

For example, I’m currently in development on a sci-fi feature, and while it has a number of speculative components at its core, the story I’m trying to tell is quite a simple and grounded one about grief and love, and how those two things can often feed off each other. I’m working with various partners on the project, and I’m starting to experience how the ‘sci-fi’ elements in the story are becoming a bit of a distraction for us as we develop the project. Is this how it would actually work in practice? What are the ramifications if this speculative science was true? What does the script have to say about the advancements in technology that feature?

Of course, it’s really important for the audience’s enjoyment of the film that the speculative elements of the world feel solid, make sense and are believable, but my feeling is that they are a means to the script landing and not an end. They are there to help us to get to what the story is about, but they aren’t what the story is about. They function — as I said before — as a metaphor.

Why not then, it would be fair to ask, just tell a grounded, dramatic story about the thing that I want to say? Why bother with the metaphor at all?

The answer, I think, is the audience’s relationship with what they’re watching. In science fiction, an audience is immediately prepared to suspend their understanding of the current world — they realise to do so is part of the generic conventions they’re buying into — and because of that, they begin to stretch their sense of what is possible within that world. In a drama, their expectations are set by a whole set of preconceptions conditioned by reality, and because of that (perversely maybe), your characters choices and moves become more restrained. Working in sci-fi, I think, opens up an audience’s mind to consider more than just the possibility of a strange world, it also opens them up to consider a wider range of philosophical possibilities and possible ways your characters’ stories might play out.

I’ve been watching… ATLANTICS on Netflix

ATLANTICS (or Atlantique in the original French) on Netflix, is a beautiful and fantastic in both senses of the word. Written by Olivier Demangel and Mati Diop, who also directs, it is a film about love and loss and identity. In it, a group of men working on a massive property development in Dakar who haven’t been paid for months head off on a dangerous sea crossing to find work in Spain. They leave behind a number of women including Ada, who is torn between the man she loves, Souleiman, one of the workers, and the man her family wishes her to marry, the rich and repulsive Omar. The men’s boat disappears on the voyage, but it quickly becomes clear that they may return. The film is stylishly and economically told, it’s beautifully shot. For its simplicity it is incredibly ambitious, packed with ideas and emotion, and with some corking performances at its core.

I’ve been reading… THE HIDDEN WAYS by Alistair Moffat

In THE HIDDEN WAYS, Alistair Moffat tells the history and geography of Scotland’s landscape through his search for once important but now forgotten roads and pathways. Moffat is a writer, historian and a former director of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and he uses his ramblings to take on as diverse topics as medieval pilgrimages to St Andrews to the hangings that used to take place on Edinburgh’s royal mile. Which is not to say that Moffat’s wanderings are always particularly scenic. He seems, in his attempts to find the old roads he’s searching for, to spend most of his time jumping over barbed wire fences and getting stuck in the mud. 

If I had one criticism, it is that despite his obvious mastery of the history, Moffat sometimes relies too much on myth-making and his (undeniably strong) sense of storytelling to get him through — probably most problematically when he speaks of the homeless wanderers in the early part of the twentieth century, which he seems to regard as modern-day noble savages or savants.  In one passage, he cheerfully wanders up to a contemporary traveller community and seems perplexed when he gets short shrift. Perhaps, he assumes, it is because of the cold reception they’ve gotten from the community, but it may just as well have been that they spotted a jolly middle-class soul who was bound to romanticise them in the book he is writing.

All my best,

James.