Does your science fiction have a goal besides entertainment?

[Steve Harrison]

My main goal is certainly to entertain, but it's also an outlet for me to verbalise all those personal and contradictory thoughts and opinions, give free reign to my 'nasty' side, express my world view, 'correct' life situations in which I wish I had acted differently, right wrongs and otherwise give vent to my personal feelings through the characters.

I don't expect readers to get what I'm saying in the subtext or agree or even care what I think, but I do hope it adds depth to the entertainment.

 

[Lumens]

Actually, skimming thought this thread made me realise that I don't really know why I am writing... Self expression, maybe. Anything in addition to that is a bonus.

 

[-K2-]

One thing I will add. In ALL of my writing, I insert numerous events from my life. Besides that, I'll very often take who and how I was as a person at a certain point in my life, and use that personality and reactions that I know implicitly to build one or sometimes even a few characters.

Besides not having to work out how those characters are, it gives me an opportunity to rehash bits of my past, turn right when I could have turned left, or sometimes simply lay it out there working it out one final time.

Then I'm done with it...

K2

 

[Enforcer Productions]

I'd say my primary goal of my current sci-fi story is to get people, especially kids, into space. Having grown up with a fascination with space, and having only realized the scale of space in the past couple of years, I hope that I can give the same feeling of amazement that I experienced to someone else.

Also, I wish to show that a bigger scale can be used in sci-fi stories. After all, there's plenty of space out in space.

 

[Cathbad]

I dunno... I've yet to write a sci-fi story someone wants to read!!

 

[Joshua Jones]

I dunno... I've yet to write a sci-fi story someone wants to read!!

Thank you for volunteering to beta my Hard(ish) SF WIP! I wasn't going to ask, because I know Fantasy is more your thing, but if you insist...

 

[Robert Zwilling]

A long time ago I started out with a story that had adventure, comedy, about boosting local space exploration, space stations, etc. The idea that the Earth Moon Mars arena was a real place to set up a story. As time went on I kicked out the attempts at strict reality, comedy went next as it was replaced by horror created by vampires added to cast who were then kicked out as being too ridiculous and replaced by more realistic characters. Then I based the story on real current events from the day to day news but projected it 20 years from now in a neutral slant. The message ended up being nothing is going to get solved anytime soon. Its got some realism and some point blank speeches for those interested in reading them and its a free download so no one gets burned by shelling out for something whose description was designed to sell the story and because it is an ebook, it is very easy to skim over what you aren't interested in. I imagine people attempting to skim through clear to the end. Do people like the style of having current day problems placed in their escapist reading that isn't far into the future? I think not. Then again, if the story was considerably shorter [cut to 1 message and the rest scenery] and 50,000 words is now considered a story, it might work.