Is it easy for you to create/visualize fictional weapons, gadgets, and cities?

[Eric S. Kim]

To be honest, I get a little envious when other writers are able to create some unique things in Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels. It's easy to think about weapons, gadgets, and cities that you've already seen in movies and TV Shows (Star Wars, Doctor Who, Game of Thrones, etc.). But to create these things strictly for novels and to describe them in detail is pretty challenging (and fun at the same time). I'm working on a Sci-Fi trilogy, and it's kind of hard to create fictional military weapons that could be created twenty years from today. But then again, it's easy for me to describe North America and South America when it's not a thousand years into the future. I'm still trying to create/visualize weapons and computer gadgets in my head, and hopefully they'll be worth it when I add them in the first volume of my trilogy.

So is it easy for you to do to create something that's as fascinating and unique as a lightsaber, or a place like Minas Tirith? Or is it hard to make some of this stuff up in your head and on paper?

 

[Mad Alice]

A lot of the bits and pieces I bandaid over with (put big impressive gun here) and (really neat underwater city here)
Sort of things and get back to it, because the story and the writing trumps the detail fidgety bits at least to me.
So I will have [big fight, she kills him, client dies anyway] and write in the action when I am inspired.
Because a lot of times I am really busy holding on to the story with both hands trying not to let the good bits slip away. And I can't even shoehorn the scenes or fights or description in, i am writing so tight. I can't even focus upon that sort of external when I am plunged so deep into the internal storyline. So I make picture notes of what I think it should look like in a file.. Then review them and write them.

 

[James118]

For me, that kind of stuff is most of the time incidental. For example, I have a monster in my recently-released high fantasy adventure that's basically a T-Rex made of bodies. The idea came when I saw the film 300, and saw that sort of tree structure the Persians made with Greek corpses (I think). Plus I have an Inferno-esque situation at one point, where characters are being gruesomely punished for their sins. A lot of the punishment ideas came before the characters and their sins. I have a pretty f***ed up mind.

Anyway, yeah. When I come up with something interesting like that, I try to think of a way to fit it into the story, meaningfully. If I can't, then it has no place, but I can almost always manage it.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I'm face blind and apparently that carries over to visual imaginings. Which explains a lot about my physical description of things. I struggle to see them. I could tell you how things feel in my character's hands, how they smell, how the air is, and would have to squint and think about the colour of the brickwork.

I have no answer to it except good betas who yell at me to make it so they can see it, and lots of edits.

 

[Loren]

I'm face blind...

Prosopagnosia?

For some things I find making a rendering is helpful.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Prosopagnosia?

For some things I find making a rendering is helpful.

That's the one. I did a Harvard research project which told me I was lucky to recognise my own mother, frankly.

Interestingly, it looks like my youngest child has inherited it. Cue a lifetime of conversational gambits seeking to discover enough about the other person to work out who they are...

 

[Locrian]

I was looking over some of my tech notes the other day and set them out a bit better. Saw a presentation a while ago from a physics professor who was looking at sci-fi in terms of "miracle exceptions" in equations to describe technologies or powers that don't exist yet, which is an approach I like.

I found that when I laid out the tech I'm using for my WIP, looking at the rules I set out for it all together, I came up with more stuff, some of them implied other things were possible within my rules. One I'm particularly proud of is an oscillating gravity/antigravity generator which I'm giving one of my characters to play with in a dangerous situation and see what happens.

 

[Loren]

I was looking over some of my tech notes the other day and set them out a bit better. Saw a presentation a while ago from a physics professor who was looking at sci-fi in terms of "miracle exceptions" in equations to describe technologies or powers that don't exist yet, which is an approach I like.

I found that when I laid out the tech I'm using for my WIP, looking at the rules I set out for it all together, I came up with more stuff, some of them implied other things were possible within my rules. One I'm particularly proud of is an oscillating gravity/antigravity generator which I'm giving one of my characters to play with in a dangerous situation and see what happens.

Personally, for hard-science fiction I would be wary of using pseudoscience as a foundation for a story (unless it was tongue and cheek).

Anyone worth their salt may find it offensive and put your book down.

I would stick with things in scholarly publications like Nature. You won't find Roschin-Godin, Pons-Fleischmann, or others like them in peer reviewed publications.

Just be careful.

You are better just inventing something and don't explain it.

 

[Nick B]

I grew up (from the age of about ten) writing fiction (sf and f) and running roleplaying groups so creating entire worlds, races, religions, technology and magic is natural for me. So, I have to say yes, I find it pretty easy. Getting it into words and making other geople see it as you see it is the tricky part.

 

[millymollymo]

Quellist, do you find your reader needs to see exactly as you do?

 

[Nick B]

No, but I want to think they do

 

[Mad Alice]

I grew up (from the age of about ten) writing fiction (sf and f) and running roleplaying groups so creating entire worlds, races, religions, technology and magic is natural for me. So, I have to say yes, I find it pretty easy. Getting it into words and making other geople see it as you see it is the tricky part.

I did roleplaying games as well, and used to set it up as a story world. But I found the biggest caveat to be that you had this really neat place where nothing in particular happened. No story. At least not an engaging one. Just very thick story bones.
After I had done quite a lot of these creative abortions I found that in telling the story you don't really need to lay on the details of the world with a trowel. Just understanding what those details consist of more naturally incorporates them as they occur in the story elements, to my experience.

 

[Nick B]

Exactly, but the practice in creating such things makes it easier to now visualise what I am writing. The wealth of ideas, technologies and so on has built in me a huge resource to draw upon. That and a big interest in weaponry, technology and science makes for good ideas.

 

[Ihe]

I find making up a theoretical possibility and then trying to find practical uses for it works for me. For example, if matter could be compressed up to a certain extent by commercially available hand-held devices, how would technology be? What laws need to be in place to regulate such technology? Society and ways of life? Jobs? The city itself, together with its inhabitants? If the theory can be put into practice well enough you could build an entire new universe around it. Thats why I always take a bottom-up approach to world building. A couple of ingenious gadgets can change the way a world works and they way people think, feel, and interact.

The problem with many sf&f gadgets is that they are created exclusively for plot purposes, and writers some times ignore the fact certain gadgets dont get made solely to give YOUR MC a way out of that specific cell he's gotten himself into. These types of gadgets would never get made if they cannot turn a profit or if the investment is too big or if the uses of it are limited in opportunities of use, scope or effectivity.

 

[Juliana]

As a reader, I tend to prefer loose descriptions of gadgets, weapons, technology etc that let me imagine things the way I want. Too many details tend to interrupt the flow of the story. Obvious exception for books like 'The Martian' where the gadgets are sort of the whole point!

So as a writer I tend to do this too (but then, I don't write hard sci fi, so I can get away with more). I figure no one needs a detailed description of a weapon when I can just call it a 'stunner' and be done with it.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Weapons and gadgets don't interest me, but artifacts do, and I think I am pretty good at visualizing and writing about cities.

 

[Locrian]

Personally, for hard-science fiction I would be wary of using pseudoscience as a foundation for a story (unless it was tongue and cheek).

Anyone worth their salt may find it offensive and put your book down.

I would stick with things in scholarly publications like Nature. You won't find Roschin-Godin, Pons-Fleischmann, or others like them in peer reviewed publications.

Just be careful.

You are better just inventing something and don't explain it.

To be honest, most of the details are just for me anyway. Most of the stuff in my tech notes is so that I have consistent rules I can follow in the application of the things I've come up with, and there isn't any reason to describe the inner workings of in the plot anyway.

Also, as much as I like my sci-fi to be harder rather than softer, I really don't see a problem with handwavium if used sensibly and consistently in a work of fiction. What ever we think is not possible now may not be the case by the time somebody has chosen to set their story, be that in centuries or millennia to come. It works for a lot of sci-fi, I only see it as a problem if it is used inconsistently or to aid lazy storytelling.

 

[Tim Murray]

To be honest, I get a little envious when other writers are able to create some unique things in Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels. It's easy to think about weapons, gadgets, and cities that you've already seen in movies and TV Shows (Star Wars, Doctor Who, Game of Thrones, etc.). But to create these things strictly for novels and to describe them in detail is pretty challenging (and fun at the same time). I'm working on a Sci-Fi trilogy, and it's kind of hard to create fictional military weapons that could be created twenty years from today. But then again, it's easy for me to describe North America and South America when it's not a thousand years into the future. I'm still trying to create/visualize weapons and computer gadgets in my head, and hopefully they'll be worth it when I add them in the first volume of my trilogy.

So is it easy for you to do to create something that's as fascinating and unique as a lightsaber, or a place like Minas Tirith? Or is it hard to make some of this stuff up in your head and on paper?

Sometimes it is easy for me and sometimes it is like pulling teeth. Inventions from past successful series is sometimes a good foundation to start from, especially it they are already grounded in reality and fact. Some of the best stuff comes from our own imaginations, no matter how far out it might seem at the time.

 

[nightdreamer]

I figure no one needs a detailed description of a weapon when I can just call it a 'stunner' and be done with it.

Exactly! It's something of a pet peeve of mine to go explaining how everything works unless it's part of the story that one person is explaining or introducing technology to another. We don't describe the workings of an internal combustion engine every time someone hops in his car; we just take them for granted, as future humans would with a stunner. I have a stunner in A Hierarchy of Gods, and I don't say a darned thing about how it works. I do mention a little about how a Kyattoni "wand" works, but that's only because the protagonist is curious about it.

That said, I often to go great lengths to work out how my technology works, but that is primarily to make sure I'm creating a logically consistent universe, not so I can explain it to the reader. If I have to explain it, however, I already have the information I need. But to answer the question, no, I don't find it particularly hard. Bear in mind that it can be difficult to come up with something truly new. Lightsabers were around long before Star Wars. Heck, flaming swords go back at least as far as Genesis and the Garden of Eden; all Lucas did is give his a technological twist. Mythology isn't a bad place to pull out some interesting "inventions" from.

 

[Mirannan]

It can be quite fun to take one or two technological developments and see what human ghastly ingenuity (presumably yours) can come up with in the way of a weapon. A good example of this is from Niven; the two developments are monofilament wire (here meaning that the molecules run the whole length of the wire) and stasis field technology. What do you get from that? The variable-sword. Nasty.

BTW, a very quick description of the way an item works (maybe part of the name) can be valuable because it might suggest possibilities. An example is the already-mentioned stunner. Now call it a sonic stunner and you get, pretty well automatically, some defenses against it. Noise-cancelling headphones, maybe, or maybe the fact this little gadget doesn't work in vacuum might turn out to be important.