Science Fiction Prototyping. Brian David Johnson

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CHAPTER 3

      How to Build Your Own SF Prototype in Five Steps or Less

      So now it is time to create your own SF prototype. As we talked about before, the goal of the SF prototype is to use science fact as the basis of your vision of the future. In this chapter, we have broken down the SF prototyping process into five discreet steps. Each step in the process will take you through a kind of framework for getting started and collaborating. At the end of the five steps, you will have an outline that you can use to expand, develop and build your own SF prototype.

      The final form of the SF prototype is up to you. Later, in this book, we will give you some examples of the three different forms of SF prototypes: short stories, movies and comic books. Each chapter on the different forms will give you a little history and background along with a discussion with an industry expert. These experts will provide you with their own personal take on the form of storytelling and how to best use the SF prototype. At the end of each chapter, there are also some practical steps to take for your outline and build it into an engaging prototype.

      But, first, we have to pull together an outline.

THE OUTLINE

      The outline of the SF prototype is where your ideas and reflections on the broader contextual issues will really get explored. The outline will force you to think about science in a realistic setting of people and society, without forcing you to actually become a science fiction writer (although there will be nonrequired opportunities to flesh your outlines into complete stories, if you so desire).

      The purpose of the outline is to capture the idea behind the story and put it into a plot. Alan Moore, the legendary comic book writer and creator of The Watchmen, V for Vendetta and the Sandman series, describes the distinction between the idea and the plot in this way:

       The idea is what is the story is about; not the plot of the story, or the unfolding of the events within the story, but what the story is essentially about. As an example from my own work (not because it’s a particularly good example but because I can speak about the work with more authority about it than I can the work of other people). I would cite issue #40 of Swamp Thing, “The Curse.”

      The story was about the difficulties endured by women in masculine societies; using the common taboo of menstruation as a central motif. This was not the plot of the story—the plot concerned a young married woman moving into a new home built upon the site of an old Indian lodge and finding herself possessed by the dominating spirit that still resided there, turning her into a form of a werewolf. (Moore, 2008)

      Moore gives us a great way of looking at the difference between the idea and the plot. When we start to think about constructing our science fiction prototype, the idea of the story will be your topic, the scientific issue that you draw from papers and experiments. The plot of the story is what you will contract from your outline.

      Think back to our previous example in Chapter 1. In the story Nebulous Mechanisms, the idea of the story comes from the paper Using Multiple Personas in Service Robots to Improve Exploration Strategies when Mapping New Environments. The paper explores the benefits of building irrationality into the artificial intelligence of domestic robots to improve their ability to adapt to complex environments. The plot of the story revolves around Dr. Simon Egerton’s investigation of why the robots from the Ceres mine have started going to church on Sundays.

      In Nebulous Mechanisms, the idea is why the story is being told, it is the idea and the theory that are being worked out in the fiction. The plot is what actually happens in the narrative. It is a linear set of events involving characters, locations and situations where we can explore the implications of the idea. We can put the idea into a real-world setting and see how it plays out and better understand the idea’s effect on both the characters and the locations.

      Dean R. Koontz is a powerhouse writer. He has been on the best selling fiction lists for over 30 years, and 24 of his titles have reached the number one spot. So it is pretty easy to say that Koontz knows quite a lot about how to put together a story. What many people do not know is that back in 1981, Koontz wrote a book on writing called: How to Write Best Selling Fiction. It is a very practical book that discusses Koontz’s ideas on writing, story construction and the professional literary marketplace.

      In his book, Dean Koontz describes science fiction plots (he calls them category fiction or genre fiction) as being a little different than other kinds of writing.

      The plot is usually the skeleton and the tendons and the vital organs and the muscle … a strong plot—one that is based on an ever-worsening series of complications—is essential. (Koontz, 1981)

      For your SF prototype, you will outline the plot and explore the implications of your topic. A story outline is as Koontz describes it, the skeleton, of the story. The outline provides a step-by-step description of what happens in the story. In most cases, the outline is not written in prose like a story. For our purposes, a list of events and description will serve to describe the action in your fictional world. To help things along, I have provided a rough structure for your outline below (Figure 1).