The Final Front Ear, by Ben Jeapes

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

I could be very naughty and cheat here. You see, some of us are getting together to explore the possibility of a new science fiction and fantasy group within ACW. I have to write something about it for the website and the magazine, and as my slot was coming up for a monthly blog piece anyway, I thought …

But, no, this blog is about writing and should be of interest to anyone, whether or not they’re fans of science fiction and fantasy. And, whoops, I seem to have announced the group anyway. How did that happen? (There’s five of us so far …)

So instead I thought I would share what I love about this particular genre.

I think first of all there is the way it vastly increases the range of storytelling possibilities. The first ‘modern’ science fiction — over 200 years young! — is generally recognised as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a look at the responsibilities of being the creator of life. H.G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds to give the European nations, then busily dividing Africa up for their own ends, a taste of exactly what it might be like to be colonised. The downsides of AI have been in the news a lot recently; well, I can’t think of a single sad story drawn from recent real life that I didn’t read first in a story published some time in the last one hundred years. Isaac Asimov was the first writer who really explored the implications of conscienceless artificial minds that could be relied on to fulfil their programming to the absolute, literal letter – and his first robot story was published in 1940.

And it’s not all dire warnings, of course. You can speculate. One theme I wanted to explore in my novel His Majesty’s Starship was an alien race with a psychology the exact opposite of ours. The more humans are successful, the more responsibility they are given. My aliens are descended from herd animals and find managing large numbers a doddle; the real challenge is in managing fewer and fewer individuals, the more senior they get.

There are many, many more examples. Forget the effects-laden blockbusters that you see on screen, fun though many of them are. As a rough rule of thumb, ideas in a science fiction TV series are probably about ten years old; in a movie it’s more like fifty, all thoroughly explored in print years ago. Writing is where the ideas are.

But I don’t just like to explore ideas to be clever. I like ideas that take my breath away. Ideas that make me go wow!, and which fill me with awe and wonder. Because that is when I feel I am really getting on the wavelength of the creator God who is worshipped in such amazing pieces of scripture as Psalm 8. There is a direct link between C.S. Lewis’s experiencing the grandeur of Nordic literature and his trinitarian Christian beliefs; read his Surprised by Joy to see how he truly was surprised. That is the feeling I get from science fiction and no other genre of writing.

So, that’s me and that’s us. If anyone would like to be added to this group, please feel free to let me know: I can be contacted via my website in the bio below.

Ben Jeapes took up writing in the mistaken belief that it would be easier than a real job (it isn’t). Hence, as well as being the author of eight novels and co-author of many more, he has also been a journal editor, book publisher, and technical writer. His most recent title is a children’s biography of Ada Lovelace. www.benjeapes.com