Writing popular fiction

Old-World family unit be restored? After all, a woman would need a man to protect her against the more adventuresome criminals who might try breaking into fortified apartments and houses, and she would have to relinquish at least a little of her new-found liberation, for strictly biological reasons.
    Factories: Production plants that now work around the clock, with three different shifts, would either have to close down during darkness, or provide sleeping facilities for one whole shift that would work through most of the dark hours but couldn't go home immediately when their shift was over.
    Fire protection: How would firemen, forced to answer an alarm in the night, assure their own safety? Fire trucks like tanks? Armoured suits?
    Rural life: Would those people living in the relatively peaceful rural areas be overwhelmed by city-dwellers anxious to escape their beleaguered metropolises? Would country people ban together to forcefully prevent such immigration? Or would the city people stick it out, holding on to their way of life, refusing to opt for the rural way?
    Criminals themselves: Who would they prey on, in the dark hours, if most citizens were behind bolted doors and armoured windows? Each other?
    Politics: Would demagogues rise to power on the national level, promising law and order and delivering dictatorship? Would national leadership choose to ignore the plight of the cities? Would some cities, in anger at the federal government's apathy, secede from the country—or form their own outlaw states? Would dictators arise in these city-states? Would none of this happen and, instead, the breakdown in law and order during darkness be considered just another "burden" of city life as, today, metropolitan residents view outrageous pollution and overpopulation?
    Broadcast media: With more people staying home at nights, would the broadcast media become even more popular? With the larger audience, would new forms of broadcast media—other than radio and standard television-be put on the market? Three-dimensional television? Total sensory television? Home motion picture tape systems?
    From this list, you can see that, though you may be extrapolating chiefly one thing, that single exaggerated social factor will have a pronounced effect on every facet of daily life.

ALIEN CONTACT STORY
    The second plot type in science fiction is the
alien contact story
. This includes invasions of the Earth like H. G. Wells'
The War of the Worlds
, though, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, this kind of fright story is presently out of vogue. More subtle and therefore more terrifying invasion stories, like John Christopher's
The Possessors
, are far more acceptable to today's readers: stories, in brief, in which only a few people—perhaps only a single household or individual—may ever know about the alien presence, in which the threat of world conquest is not dramatized in melodramatic terms, but in human ones. The alien contact story also includes novels about voyages of Earthmen to other worlds, and even stories in which the alien is a man from so far in the future of our own Earth that he is either mentally, physically, or
both
mentally and physically unlike a man. A good novel in this vein is Robert Silverberg's
The Masks of Time
, which deals with a physically perfect man from the future whose mind is strangely different from our own, his attitudes quite unlike ours.
    Putting aside the man from the far future device—since it is rarely used—we see that all other aliens are extraterrestrial in nature, beings from other worlds and other galaxies, even other universes. No matter what the nature of the alien being, you can handle it in two ways. First, you may construct a creature which has evolved under entirely different circumstances than mankind has. Perhaps it's an alien from a world with many times our gravity. (Hal Clement's
Mission of Gravity
is a classic with this kind of background. ) Perhaps it comes from a world where the atmosphere is predominately methane or some other substance toxic to man. The possibilities are limitless. If you choose this path, you must thoroughly research—through science books—what such a world would be like, extrapolating from what present-day facts you can find. Then, you must learn what effects such strange conditions would have on the evolution of a species. Only then can you hope to convince the reader of the validity of your vision.
    The second way to handle your alien