Writing popular fiction

countenance. His voice cracked like papyrus unrolled for the first time in millenia, and he gripped the chair as the words came, and he squinted his already squinted eyes, and he said, "You're the one." It was an accusation. "You're the one they sent for."
    For the first time in many years, I was afraid. I was not certain what terrified me, but it was a deep and relentless uneasiness, far more threatening than The Fear which rose in me most nights when I considered my origins and the pocket of the plastic womb from which I came.
    "You," the child said again.
    "Who is he?" I asked the assembled military men.
    No one spoke immediately, as if they wanted to be sure the freak in the chair was finished.
    He wasn't.
    "I don't like you," he said. "You're going to be sorry you came here. I'm going to see to that."
    A bit of background is added, extrapolating on advancements in criminology with the "identiplate." By the end of the chapter, the hero has encountered the problem of the child/ancient who is apparently born of the Artificial Wombs and who intends him harm. Wondering what kind of harm, and whether the hero can escape it, lead the reader on.
    As the plot develops in chapter two, the reader learns that the Artificial Creation program is a military effort to develop human psionic weapons. Simeon, until this child/ ancient, was their only success, the others being merely normal or hideously mutated but all without esp. Though several hundred words of background are given on the Wombs and what they have done, it is parceled out through the entire chapter, as it was in chapter one, rather than delivered in one or two long expository paragraphs. This parceling-out is the key to a good science fiction background construction.
    At one time, writers differentiated story characters by labels, simple descriptive tags used for repeated character identification. The writer would blatantly label one woman a hussie, the next a "good" woman, this man a cold-blooded egoist, the next a man of humanitarian impulses. Thereafter, when reappearing, the characters were recalled to the reader by their labels. Editors and writers alike shun such simplistic "craftsmanship" these days. You are expected to develop your characters through their actions, by
showing
the reader instead of
telling
him.
    For example, if one of your story people engages in a fist fight, bests his opponent but continues to beat and kick him after he has won, we do not need to have the character labeled a sadist. He has
shown
us, by his actions, that he has ugly violent urges.
    If another character sits in a fancy restaurant, eating french fried potatoes with his fingers, belching, telling raucous jokes, his napkin balled beside his plate rather than smoothed over his lap or thigh, he is clearly somewhat of a mannerless lout. The writer does not have to directly label him as such.
    Likewise, it is no longer acceptable for a writer to differentiate his story people through the use of physical quirks or personality idiosyncrasies. A character with a scarred face and no other traits to separate him from his fellows is not a character at all, but a vague outline. A man identified continually through a habit—scratching his chin, pacing, always with a certain kind of drink, or by repeated use of the same phrase—is also a thin creation, ultimately unbelievable.
    This is not to say that physical quirks and idiosyncrasies are to be avoided. They work well in conjunction with carefully explained motivation and a well-rounded portrait of
all
aspects of a character's personality.
    A common mistake made by good, new category fiction writers is that in their science fiction stories they attempt to fully realize the
human
characters, but they construct the aliens out of cardboard, spit, and prayer. As I said before, the non-human members of your science fiction cast must be as believably motivated and as individualistic as any of their human counterparts, with but two exceptions: (1) when the alien is used as a comic foil or focus for satire or slapstick humor (and I've already warned against this approach), or (2) when the aliens never appear directly in the story, or appear only fleetingly, chiefly revealed as a sinister, unseen force (examples of this sort of story are
Out of the Deeps
by John Wyndham, which recounts a horrifying battle between mankind and unseen aliens who live beneath the seas, and
The Shores of Another Sea
by Chad Oliver, which describes a first contact