Science Fantasy

My scientific work has also influenced my other writing, a trilogy of near-future thrillers about eco-terrorism and global environmental change. The first of the trilogy, THE LAST ALBATROSS, was published in 2000 and the second, TERMINATOR GENE, will come out in 2002. But that's another story entirely; almost another life.

My scientific training has definitely influenced how I write fantasy, particularly in the way I look at fantastic phenomena. For example, if I'm describing someone using a portal, its not just a device to carry characters across a continent in the nick of time. As with the things we use in real life, it has particular characteristics, problems and effects. Sometimes a portal goes wrong, or breaks down, or affects those using it in unusual ways.

When people are using any kind of magic or magical device, I try to imagine what that phenomenon would actually be like. Say the portal goes from the tropics at sea level (eg, in our world, Singapore) to high latitude mountains (the Andes). The air pressure is higher at sea level in Singapore, the air is hotter and more humid. So when you open the gate in the highlands, air pressure will result in hot, humid air belching out through the gate and the moisture condensing into clouds of fog or mist. That's what my gate will be like. And I'm a strong believer that everything has a cost, so people using any kind of 'magic' (the Secret Art) always suffer aftersickness. Magic can't be a 'magical' solution to plot problems.

I also make sure that the calendar(s) are correct, the phases of the moon(s) match the tides, that travel times are realistic etc. In other words, I try to get all the details, even if they're only a sentence in a long novel, absolutely correct. I work hard to make the landscape, the cultures, the people and the settings different but realistic. So much fantasy (even Australian fantasy) uses the same Western European settings, the same vast oak forests, the same cliched pseudo-medieval cultures. To me, popular fantasy often seems fossilised into patterns, structures and concepts laid down fifty years ago. Alternatively, where fantasy sets out to break free of these stereotypes, it is sometimes exotic and alien at the expense of the story. For me the story always comes first.

The science angle also comes through in viewpoint. Most fantasy writers come from a humanities background, I think. I'd been writing for a decade before I realised that my outlook, as a practicing scientist of 20 years or so, differed to someone from a non-scientific background. No better, no worse, but just a slightly oblique way of looking at the world. I should stress that I don't try to explain magic with science, nor portray magic as a science that people no longer understand (and therefore think of as magic). For example, I never explain how portals work; I just show what it would really be like using one. Differences in air pressure could well be so extreme that it would be impossible to get through a gate at all. Those are the kinds of little details that make a story interesting, especially when they cause the characters problems that they could never have anticipated.

So where do my stories come from? My fantasy writing germinated in outrage back in the 1970's. I was reading a blockbuster fantasy of the time where the map in the book seemed to bear no relation to the story. Fantasy maps often seem to be drawn by people who think geography is a set of cliches, or a shopping list. "I'll have one of those deserts, and two of these arctic tundra " Not to mention geographical chauvinism , virtually every fantasy ever written is set in the Northern Hemisphere.