Writing popular fiction

time, the here-and-now, to investigate new places and encounter odd wonders with the familiar perspective of a modern-day American.

JOURNEY THROUGH A STRANGE LAND STORY
    The last story form is best described as the
journey through a strange land story
, a great trek and epic quest narrative that is science fiction chiefly by virtue of its setting which is also its plot. The characters in this kind of tale must journey from Point A to Point B, through a landscape as different from our own as a Dali painting is from the reality it represents.
    Jack Vance's Big
Planet
is the classic of this form, dealing with a huge world many times larger than Earth, and a forty thousand mile journey across an enormous continent harbouring dozens of wildly different societies, terrains, and challenges. In one short paragraph near the beginning of the novel, Vance sets the sense-of-wonder tone upon which all such stories depend, presenting a taste of marvels to come:
Looking to where Earth's horizon would lie, he could lift his
eyes and see lands reaching far on out; pencil lines of various subtle colors,
each line a plain or forest, a sea, a desert, a mountain range… He took a step
forward, looked over his shoulder. 'Let's go.'
    The landscape over which this trek takes place may be an alien planet, our
own Earth in the far future (tens of thousands of years from now and utterly
different than we know it today), an alternate world, an Earth based on an
altered past, or even our own world in the days of pre-history when the continent of Atlantis (some maintain) was the focal point of civilization. The writer must create one fantastic scene after another, make them credible, and keep the characters moving toward their distant goal, whatever it may be.
    The difference between this story and the alien contact story is simple: in the alien contact story, the alien race and mankind's interaction with it is the center of focus; in the journey through a strange land tale, the landscape itself, rather than any alien race, is the prime focus. Aliens may appear, but they are dwarfed by the land they live in.
    There are, naturally, thousands of science fiction stories, each subtly or obviously different than the last. But I believe that all of them can be categorized in these eight forms, without stretching the point much. Those published works that don't seem to fit any of the eight slots are usually composed of a combination of two or more of the plot types, such as John Brunner's
Stand on Zanzibar
, Keith Laumer's
The Long Twilight
, and my own
Beastchild
.
    By now, your plot at least sketchily outlined according to the simple plot formula mentioned in Chapter One, your background detailed, you are ready to begin putting the story on paper. It is not sufficient, however, merely to launch into the tale. A science fiction novel requires that certain conditions be met in the first paragraph, others in the first few pages, if the finished work is to be successful. We'll examine these conditions, and how to begin, next.
    Every category novel must hook the reader's attention in the first paragraph and, if possible, in the very first sentence. It must provoke in him an immediate "need to know" how the situation, stated in the first paragraph, will be resolved. Once the narrative hook has been planted, the story may hold the reader's interest in one of two ways:
    (1) the original situation, which caught his attention, turns out to be the major problem of the story and will not be resolved until the conclusion, after many intermediate challenges to the hero; (2) the hook turns out to be a minor problem that leads the hero rapidly into his most important bind. In either case—though (1) is preferable to (2)—the pace must be swift, the danger and the suspense continuous.
    In a science fiction novel, you should not only present a strong narrative hook in the initial paragraph, but also give the reader a glimpse of the background of the story, thereby acclimating him to all the extrapolative detail yet to come. The sooner the reader understands that the story is set on another planet or in the future, the better equipped he will be to follow the plot without confusion.
    Yet this information should not come in a dry, encyclopedic fashion. It should be a part of the narrative, incorporated into the developing story without causing the slightest hesitation in the plot pace. The following selection of first paragraphs should help you to understand how