Science Fiction Prototyping. Brian David Johnson
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young married woman moving into a new home built upon the site of an old Indian lodge and finding herself possessed by the dominating spirit that still resided there, turning her into a form of a werewolf. (Moore, 2008)
Moore gives us a great way of looking at the difference between the idea and the plot. When we start to think about constructing our science fiction prototype, the idea of the story will be your topic, the scientific issue that you draw from papers and experiments. The plot of the story is what you will contract from your outline.
Think back to our previous example in Chapter 1. In the story Nebulous Mechanisms, the idea of the story comes from the paper Using Multiple Personas in Service Robots to Improve Exploration Strategies when Mapping New Environments. The paper explores the benefits of building irrationality into the artificial intelligence of domestic robots to improve their ability to adapt to complex environments. The plot of the story revolves around Dr. Simon Egerton’s investigation of why the robots from the Ceres mine have started going to church on Sundays.
In Nebulous Mechanisms, the idea is why the story is being told, it is the idea and the theory that are being worked out in the fiction. The plot is what actually happens in the narrative. It is a linear set of events involving characters, locations and situations where we can explore the implications of the idea. We can put the idea into a real-world setting and see how it plays out and better understand the idea’s effect on both the characters and the locations.
Dean R. Koontz is a powerhouse writer. He has been on the best selling fiction lists for over 30 years, and 24 of his titles have reached the number one spot. So it is pretty easy to say that Koontz knows quite a lot about how to put together a story. What many people do not know is that back in 1981, Koontz wrote a book on writing called: How to Write Best Selling Fiction. It is a very practical book that discusses Koontz’s ideas on writing, story construction and the professional literary marketplace.
In his book, Dean Koontz describes science fiction plots (he calls them category fiction or genre fiction) as being a little different than other kinds of writing.
The plot is usually the skeleton and the tendons and the vital organs and the muscle … a strong plot—one that is based on an ever-worsening series of complications—is essential. (Koontz, 1981)
For your SF prototype, you will outline the plot and explore the implications of your topic. A story outline is as Koontz describes it, the skeleton, of the story. The outline provides a step-by-step description of what happens in the story. In most cases, the outline is not written in prose like a story. For our purposes, a list of events and description will serve to describe the action in your fictional world. To help things along, I have provided a rough structure for your outline below (Figure 1).
FIGURE 1: The five-step process.
THE FIVE STEPS
The following five steps break down the SF prototyping process into sequential accomplishable steps. They are:
Step 1: Pick Your Science and Build Your World
First, you should pick the technology, science or issue you want to explore with the prototype. Next, set up the world of your story and introduce us to the people and locations. You can answer very simple questions like who are the main characters and where will the action take place. You will also want to begin to explore an explanation of the technology in your topic.
Step 2: The Scientific Inflection Point
The introduction of the “science” or technology you are looking to explore in the prototype.
Step 3: Ramifications of the Science on People
Explore the implications and ramifications of your science on the world you have described in Step 1. What effect does the technology have? How does it change people lives? Does it create a new danger? What needs to be done to fix the problem?
Step 4: The Human Inflection Point
What did we learn from seeing the technology placed into a realistic setting? What is needed to happen to fix the problem? Does the technology need to be modified? Is there a new area for experimentation or research?
Step 5: What Did We Learn?
Explore the possible implications, solution or lessons learned from Step 4 and its human implications.
Step 1: Pick Your Science and Build Your World
Step 1 is probably the most important and most time consuming of all the steps. It is here that you will pick your topic and you will build the world where you will place your SF prototype.
The first thing to do in the process is to figure out what piece of science or technology you want to explore. This can be taken from any number of places. Many universities and teams already have research and technology they would like to expand. In Chapter 2, the story The Were-Tigers of Belum was written by the scientists who were actually doing the development of the sensor network for environmental monitoring. They developed their SF prototype as a tool to expand their thinking about how the sensor network could be used and what issues they might face as the technology was deployed. They also had some fun bringing back the mythical tigers as a reminder of the environmental issues that are currently affecting Malaysia.
If you are not currently working on a research and development project, you can review magazines and journals for your particular area of interest. It is usually more exciting to pick a piece of emerging research or science because the implications and effects of it are most likely not widely understood. Another more general place to look are popular science magazines like Scientific American, New Scientist, Nature, and Popular Science.
The goal is to pick a topic that grabs your imagination and gets you thinking about what might happen when people start using it.
When planning your SF prototype, you should begin by considering future versions of the technology you have selected to explore from you topic. You can begin by asking yourself some basic and entertaining questions:
• What are the implications of the mass adoption of the technology?
• What is the worst thing that could go wrong and how would it affect the people and locations in the story?
• What is the best thing that could happen and how would it better the lives of the people and locations of the story?
• If this technology was in an average home, how would it actually work?
Once you have started getting some ideas from these questions, you can begin to brainstorm one or more potential broader contextual issues raised by the technology in question. As you imagine the plot of your story, it is important to remember that you are placing your topic or idea in a real world. Now, granted we are talking about science fiction or your real world might be far into the future, but regardless, the world must feel real. It is still governed by the laws and logic of science. It is also important to remember that this world that you are creating needs to be populated by real people. These real people will have real problems that have nothing to do with your topic. In the future, people will still not want to go to a boring job. In the future, people will still fall in love and some will have their hearts broken. In the future, we still will feel too lazy to take out the trash.
The setting for most science fiction prototypes needs to be the near future. As we extrapolate out the