FutureWords Redux: FutureDiction
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A little while ago, I did a post for the Interrobangs blog on the subject of SF authors using ‘futuristic’ vocabulary in their work. That was inspired by a post over on the League of Extraordinary Writers…and now I’m going to shamelessly use their latest post on the topic as a launching point for my own followup. Think of it as two parallel discussions of a similar subject rather than shameless idea-mining on my part!
Using a bunch of dreaded FutureWords (see Interrobangs link above for explanation) is one easy/lazy way of giving your futuristic milieu a distinct culture, but there are better ways of doing it. If you’re good enough at crafting very distinctive yet natural-sounding dialogue, readers should be able to take a brief exchange between two characters or some first-person narration out of context and still be able to tell that it’s from your invented society – maybe there’s some characteristic slang, or a certain way of phrasing things unique to your world. Maybe the dialogue is characterised by what is not said, implying a cultural taboo or unwillingness to talk about certain subjects. The League of Extraordinary Writers post uses A Clockwork Orange as an example, but I’d like to provide another:
I’m shaking from the charge to my blood at being hit, shaking from being so fired up and so surprised and so angry and so much hating this town and the men in it that it takes me a while till I can get up and go get my dog again. What was he effing doing out here anyway? I think and I’m so hacked off, still so raging with anger and hate (and fear, yes, fear, shut up) that I don’t even look around to see if Aaron heard my Noise. I don’t look around. I don’t look around.
If you’ve read Patrick Ness’ The Knife of Never Letting Go (which I think I’ve plugged at least a hundred times by now), you should immediately recognise the above snippet of narration as belonging to Todd Hewitt, the sole viewpoint character for that book. It is unmistakably his voice, and belonging to his world, from the ‘effing’ and the fairly old-fashioned idioms (‘hacked off’) to the mysteriously-capitalised ‘Noise’. It could only have come from that book and that character. (And I chose that paragraph at random, by the way. The entire book is saturated in Todd’s character and the world he lives in.)
You might also note that none of it sounds particularly ‘futuristic’, either, and that’s because it wouldn’t make any sense if it did. Yes, the book is SF (it’s set on a colonised alien planet), but Todd is definitely not your average SF protagonist. He is largely uneducated, for one thing, and has a very limited reference pool thanks to spending his entire life in a single isolated town. He calls his own planet ‘New World’ and Earth ‘Old World’, because that’s what the people around him call them, and he doesn’t bother stopping to comment on the fact that there are two moons in the sky. He is, after all, a teenage boy who has grown up on a rural farm – the fact that the farm is in another solar system is a secondary consideration, all things considered. This is a marked departure from most SF main characters, who tend to speak and think as though they’re reading from an encyclopedia.
I don’t mean to say that you should simply import stereotypes into your SF, though. It would be all too easy to take a character like Todd and turn him into a caricatured country bumpkin from Earth, if not for the fact that he’s spent his whole life being able to hear the thoughts of everybody around him and knowing that they can hear his thoughts in turn. He’s also never seen any girls or women before, since they all died of a plague shortly after his birth. Both of these things serve as the ‘SF’ conceits to his character, but never in such a way that they feel like authorial intrusion. It’s a remarkable balancing act on Ness’ part.
Obviously most people aren’t going attempt something as stylistically complex as The Knife of Never Letting Go, but that doesn’t mean you can just ignore the way your characters speak and think. They should not pepper their dialogue with advanced scientific jargon unless they’re scientists or unusually interested in science; just as few ordinary people today would talk about climate change in terms of El Niño cycles and CO2 emission levels, so your characters should not be mysteriously fluent in the terminology surrounding space travel or human cloning unless it makes sense given what else the reader knows about them.
This image has nothing to do with the topic of the post, I just think it looks awesome.
I’m going to be self-indulgent here and use my own WIP as an example, Just Because.
The main character of Castor is James, a 16-year old boy who lived on Earth for about nine years before being transported to the titular planet. He speaks in what I’m hoping is going to end up (after a lot of revision!) being a fairly characteristic way; it would be possible for a particularly astute reader to work out where on Earth he was originally from based on certain aspects of the way he speaks and narrates the story (this is a minor plot point in the book, since people on Castor don’t generally tell other people specifics about their lives on Earth). At the same time, he also sounds a lot like the people he’s lived with and around on Castor – which is to say, completely different from one of the other main characters, who has grown up in very different circumstances.
I don’t really see this as being different from the choices all writers make about how their characters sound. All right, there are some extra things to take into account when you’re talking about characters living on another planet (everybody in Castor is speaking a common shared language rather than English, for example, so there’s some aspect of Translation Convention), but it’s not that different or more complex than what happens when you’re writing characters in two different countries. Things only start to get really interesting when you then layer some SF considerations on top of the more everyday stuff. For example, nobody in Castor is likely to describe somebody in animalistic terms (‘weaselly eyes’ or what have you) because most Earth animals don’t exist on the planet. Also, James uses the word ‘Jesus’ as an expletive in the narration, but rarely in his actual dialogue; there is a very good reason for this, but it’s not spelled out explicitly.
As I’ve indicated above, you also need to pay attention to what your characters say, not just how they say it. There’s this weird tendency among SF writers to have characters be extremely knowledgeable about the futuristic technology of their world, mostly so they can explain it to the reader. But think about it: even if you’ve been on an airplane dozens of times, the chances of you knowing much (or even anything) about how they really work are pretty slim. It should be the same way in SF: yes, James was on a spaceship, but he wouldn’t be able to tell you the first thing about how one works or how they’re constructed. (Neither would Vidal, another character who is much better-educated than he is, for the simple reason that he has no particular reason to know about that.) On the other hand, the idea of space travel is something he takes for granted. He’s not likely to stop and think ‘Woah, spaceships. Holy crap’.
Bottom line: if you’re writing science fiction, it’s a good idea to put as much effort into how your characters think and speak as you do into the nuts-and-bolts detail of your worldbuilding. In fact, I’d say this kind of thing is actually more important in many cases…but that’s a topic for another (hopefully less long-winded) post!
