Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast
Oct. 27th, 2005 07:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccastareyesI once heard that a spec-fic (Science Fiction, Fantasy, Alt. History, etc.) writer gets one 'gimmie' -- an impossible thing that we are required to just accept to make the world work. Later people have contested this -- that some writers can have two or three inter-related gimmies and still pull it off, but the consensus is there. If you have none, you are probably not in-genre (not a crime, but worth knowing). If you have more than a couple, you are writing something no one will believe -- even us SF/F fans.
The problem is, I feel like I use too many -- and I think it's just my over-ciritical side. Here's what I got for my NaNovel.
-- Psychic powers
-- FTL travel (the two are related, though I doubt this will be touched upon).
-- A species that live in 'hyperspace' (the space FTL ships travel through) but have a stage of life that lives in real-space.
-- Humanoid aliens
-- Probably a few other things
I know some of these are genre conventions, but I can't help but wonder if this is too much. The aliens thing especially bothers me -- I tack on a lot of details that make them different than humans, but do people really buy that things that can pass for humans in if you only see a shadow and don't look closely could evolve on another world completely removed from Earth?
The problem is, I feel like I use too many -- and I think it's just my over-ciritical side. Here's what I got for my NaNovel.
-- Psychic powers
-- FTL travel (the two are related, though I doubt this will be touched upon).
-- A species that live in 'hyperspace' (the space FTL ships travel through) but have a stage of life that lives in real-space.
-- Humanoid aliens
-- Probably a few other things
I know some of these are genre conventions, but I can't help but wonder if this is too much. The aliens thing especially bothers me -- I tack on a lot of details that make them different than humans, but do people really buy that things that can pass for humans in if you only see a shadow and don't look closely could evolve on another world completely removed from Earth?
