Free How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card Page B

instructions from people on the home planet.
    This is enormously convenient if you want to have a fairly unified interstellar society and yet don’t want people hopping from planet to planet the way some people commute by air from Boston to New York. A space voyage remains an irrevocable decision, cutting you off from everyone you leave behind, yet the whole interstellar society can share literature, politics, news-anything that can be transmitted by ansible. It’s as if the Pilgrims could have communicated with England by radio, but still had to do all their traveling in small, dangerous, unhealthy wooden ships.
    As science, of course, this is pure nonsense-yet it is so useful that many of us have used some variation on it. After all, we’re not trying to predict the future, only to tell a story in a strange place!

    Warp speed. I haven’t even touched on the silliest of space travel rules the one used in the Star Trek universe, where the speed of light is no more a barrier than the speed of sound, and you only have to persuade Scotty in the engine room to really step on the gas to get to four, eight, ten times the speed of light. This sort of stardrive shows such contempt for science that it’s best to reserve it for light adventures or comic stories-or, of course, Star Trek novelizations.
    In fact, unless you’re actually writing a Star Trek novel (which means you must already have a contract with the publisher licensed by Paramount Pictures) or are deliberately trying to be funny, never refer to “warp speed” in your fiction. It’s not only bad science, it also pegs you instantly as a writer who knows science fiction only through Star Trek. Beware of anything that makes non-Trekkie readers think of Star Trek. That’s the
    equivalent of appling for a position as a physics professor with a resume that lists your training as “Watched every episode of Mr. Wizard.” You may actually know something, but it’ll be hard to get anyone to take you seriously long enough to find out.
    What the Rules Can Do for You

    All this attention to space travel, and your story- docsn t have a single scene aboard the ship! Do you really have to go through all this?
    Yes-in your head, or perhaps in your outline. Just enough time to make your decisions about the rules and then make sure your whole story doesn’t violate them. But your reader doesn’t have to go through all that with you. Once you’ve decided that you’re using a difficult, dangerous hyperspace where the emergence points can shift by parsecs without warning, then all you have to do is drop some reference into the story-perhaps a single sentence, like this:
    “It was a perfect flight, which is to say that they didn’t emerge from the jump through hyperspace in the middle of a star or heading straight for an asteroid, and even though everybody puked for days after the jump, nobody died of it.”
    That’s it. That’s all. No more discussion about the mechanics of starflight. But your readers will understand why none of the travelers is eager to leave the planet, and why it’ll be quite a while before another ship comes. And now, with the rules established, you’re free to do things like having your viewpoint character think of someone else this way:

    Back at Moonbase, Annie had thought Booker looked pretty good,
    thought he might be worth getting to know a little better. But after the hyperjump she had had to clean up his vomit while he whimpered and cried in the corner. He didn’t emerge from his hysteria till they were in orbit around Rainbird. Annie knew that Booker couldn’t help it, that a lot of people reacted that way to the jump, but then, she couldn’t help it, either, that it was impossible to respect him anymore after that.

    Maybe this relationship will be important in your story; maybe it won’t. But if you didn’t know that people puke a lot after the hyperspace jump, if you hadn’t worked out the rules in advance, then you couldn’t have