F()CUS SPRING 201 cus Martin M<Grath 48 Spoonen Drive, Park Street, 5t All the science you don't need to know 4 Albans. Al2 lHL Think writing hard sf is difficult? Just get maninOmartlnmc:grath.net with the assistanc:e of Clive Anderson ilnd the basics right, says Alastair Reynolds Steve GrOvtr Focus. is published twice a yeaf by tht British. Science fiction Fighting for words 8 Asso(:Iatlon. The magaZine alms to pr_nt high Cluility articles about Dev Agarwal explains why a good fight ~~:r~b~~·~::sV:~~I~~~~~s:~~~lr~'a~~;~~~~W;\~~ scene is about more than choreography. contact thfo ed,tor tim if you intend to submit I lengthy art',1fo =d~=iesrl~~~~=~~~~~f~~y~::;WA News from Orbit 11 committee members Errors and ornlSSIOtlS are the resporntbthty of Terry Jackman with the latest updates the editOl" lSSN 0144"S60X C BSfA 2011 from the BSFA's writing groups. British Science Fiction Association ltd. Masterclass 9' What I know 13 8SFAWebIote _bsla(o~ Re-gI$'l~;nEngl...-d....:lW.Jes. In the last of his regular articles, Chris Company No 921500 RegJSteredilddre$ 61Ivy(roftRNd,W.rtOll.Tlmworth. Priest offers sage advice. Slaffordshire.8190JJ One vial or two 17 Stephenhxter C John Arthur on doing biochemistry for Jon Coortenil~ Grit'llwood Iiln"""'t", real. It's not much like CSI... dw,romfilco uk MilrtlnPom 6'IvyCroftR~Wilrton. Writing the other 18 NrT..-th.1noll bsfiltrNw........I.QlftI Clarke Award-winning author lauren ""t~W,1li.1ftKM'I FW. '" Str,tton lod9t'. 79 8..,-< Ro.d Beukes says that if you want to write the lIamort.~on:hhIre.[r-l.. sEU other convincingly, you need to do your bsf...........,.~Hoo.(O.uk research. MEMBERSHIP FEES u, £.J9Pi1O< (Ul'lwil9td" (~oPil) Life memberstup 'S~ Over the wall 20 OU1'U~UIC: Gary Budgen wonders why class isn't a Jomtlfamllymembershlp AddOtothe"~p"c",'" C~Ufl (Sterhng only) should be mMle PiI~ilbte to "BSFA ltd" ,nd ~nt more important issue for writers. to Peter Wilkinson,t the ilddrm ,bo\Ie or )Oin v" the BSFA webs,te ilt wwwbsf,couk To plug or not to plug? 22 Should authors promote their own works. BSFAAWARDS Adm ~iUr;JIor OonniIxon Juliet E McKenna says it is good for _~fil.co.uIl readers and good for business. ORBITER WRmNG GROUPS learning to love learning 24 0I'lr>e TI'fT)I.liIdt..,.., teny)ildt..".nemypostofflCe.(O.uk Paul Graham Raven returns with the latest update from his Masters adventure. ALSO PUBLISHED BY THE 8SFA: Poetry in a SF magazine? 26 Vector The new Focus poetry editor, Charles THE CRITICAL JOURNAL OF THE 8SFA Christian, discusses sf poetry. ~iIIurt'i,ed'torl~'It'tleo..Sh"I'liIWorthet'l ~or.ed,ton-,lI'liIil.(om Poems from the stars 27 ....,-""" ,.. AmOR)' I+ouM. PImbury Pl.a And finally... burly detectives... 28 l.or>do<1, [slGl ...and broad-shouldered rocket wranglers. MMbnMdirm ~9Qthnet __veaor..:ltlln~oom Cover image: 0 Chaoss I Dreamstime.com 'Oog MAKING PLAUSIBLE WORLDS A little attention to detail makes a difference, reckons Martin McGrath n page four you'll find Alastair Reynold's article on the basic Orequirements necessary for writing convincing ~hard sf· - and if anyone should know, he's the man. Alastair neatly spears the myth that writing this type of sf requires a higher degree in physics, all that is really required is a commitment to getting the basics right. I recently got accused (in a nice way) of being an author of hard sf, a description with which someone else then disagreed. It was strange to read other people discussing which bOKes my stories fit in, but it also made me wonder how 1 would describe my own writing. I've written fantasy, horror and sf but about two-thirds of my stories are "core sf" in that they are specula­ tive and set in the future. Plenty of stories set in the future Spacesuits are bulky, awkward things. are, in no sense, hard sf. I've recently So, even though it wasn't central to read this year's James White Award the plot, it seemed right to take a mo­ entries and a surprising proportion ment presenting something like what of those took, uncritically, the short­ would actually happen. The character hand of "Golden Age" sf- spaceships could have run through the airlock effortlessly hopping between solar systems, galaxies populated with co­ casting bits of suit behind him and pious alien species, galaxy-spanning most readers may not have noticed bureaucracies - as a starting point. anything amiss. But, by spending a tit­ Such stories are not, necessarily, tle time getting closer to reality, I felt I bad but I have never been drawn to made this world more plausible. write them. As a reader I find that In ·Home Protection" (published stories built on this library of shared by Hub) I wrote a horror(ish) story assumptions often (there are excep­ that revolved around a pistol. The tions) lack the resolution of detail gun was an important character, so necessary to persuade me to sus­ it mattered (to me at least), that the pend my disbelief. details were convincing. I could prob­ It bothers me when writers get ably have bluffed most readers with basic facts wrong. If they can't get a "Hollywood" gun, but doing a little simple stuff right why should I follow research made me more confident them on their wilder speculations? and, I hope, that confidence was That doesn't just apply to physics or transmitted to the reader. engineering, it also applies to ecol­ Whether writing sf or fantasy or ogy, built environments, sociology horror or anything else a writer must and psychology. And it is as relevant (usually) create a world that readers in horror and fantasy as it is in sf. find plausible enough to believe in. My story "Pathfinders· (which will appear in the hard sf anthology Without drowning the reader in mi­ Rocket SCience, coming soon from nutiae (though that seems to work Mutation Press) features a protago­ for Neal Stephenson) the writer nist who has to get out of a spacesuit. should convince the reader that this It would have been easy to gloss over world is more than just cloth back­ this process, but the truth is that it's drop against which the author is ma­ not a thing that can be done quickly. nipulating puppets. SPRING 1011 F0CUS 3 ALL THE SCIENCE YOU DON'T NEED TO KNOW Alastair Reynolds on getting the basics right oe thing I've learned in my fiction, such as fantasy, romance, happened to take place against a career to date is that there's crime, the historical novel, and plausibly rendered backdrop. Oa certain type of science "'mainstream literature". It came to Given these distinctions, it might fiction that editors don't see nearly pass that no one was very sure what be easier simply to speak of core enough of, a truism that applies just science fiction was, let alone hard science fiction: the stuff where as strongly to novels as it does short science fiction, and there fell upon the implied science kind of makes fiction. It was the case when t started the land a dark time in which writers sense, although it mayor may not trying to break into Interzone, the experimented boldly, refused to be be the whole point of the story. better part of three decades ago; it constrained by genre boundaries, A core science fiction story might was true when I began to try selling and generally strove to raise their not play with scientific ideas in any a novel, and (as I know from recent ambition. overt, up-front way, but the depicted experience) it still applies now. This Despite all this, there remained actions will avoid impossibility and elusive stuff I'm talking about is of a market for something vaguely implausibility as much as possible. course hard science fiction. identifiable as hard science fiction. This is the stuff I'm talking about. Or is it? What do we mean by By which I mean stories and novels And I don't for one moment mean to hard science fiction, anyway7 For that in which events were set more or less undersell core science fiction: I think matter, what do we mean by science in our universe, in which the actions it can be as excellent and ambitious fiction? It was all so simple once upon and settings were consistent or even and literary as any other area of the a time. There was an area of writing illustrative aI, known physical law, field. Really, the sky is the limit. But called science fiction, the boundaries and in which there was a marked you can take it from me that editors of which no one disagreed about, absence of supernatural phenomena, really like this stuff. and entirely enclosed within those creatures from folklore, wizards and So - whisper it - if you can do this boundaries there lay a well-defined $0 on. A typical hard science fiction kind of thing even half well, you're nucleus of the stuff, a kind of golden story might involve speculation well on the way to getting published. citadel in which skilled practitioners about contact with aliens, the likely But, I hear lots of readers cry, I executed science fiction with absolute realities of space exploration, the can't write core science fiction, let and scrupulous adherence to known limits of artifical intelligence, the alone hard science fiction, because I physical laws.