Narrative Voice
Get radical with your narrative voice in science fiction and any other kind of literature. Postmodernism happened for a reason, and Mary Shelley was a genius for many reasons. The narrator in Douglas Adams' work, for example, sometimes addresses the reader directly—for no apparent reason—with questions and off-hand comments, breaking the narrative voice wide open. It’s fantastic.
Wiz Wharton’s chapter-by-chapter interlacing of different narrative voices and perspectives in her excellent not-an-SF-novel, Ghost, Girl, Banana, is a masterclass in literary prowess. (Stephen Fry did something somewhat similar in Making History with an in-text play, and Mary Shelley pioneered these tools in Frankenstein.)
However, this approach is still constrained—though the novel's brilliance is not—by the overarching need to use regular, predictable pacing patterns for the ‘normie’ reader’s comfort.
However, I suggest, by Grabthar’s Hammer, that we can hammer the reader a bit harder with greater narrative weirdness and less mind-buggerational, boring regularity. Stop treating readers like stylistic, narrative-consuming dummies. Adams it up a bit, as it were. More than a bit, probably.
Pynchon’s postmodern was weird. Do better.
Readers can handle a deeply erratic narrator and an unconventional narrative pattern, as long as it's executed fluidly and maintains minimal, adequate consistency.
“No, they can’t,” say editors everywhere who are with me in spirit and by critical telepathy.
“I don’t want to argue. It hurts my brain and you’re always right,” I respond.
I believe they—the readers—will thank you for it if you challenge them with narrative weirdness.
“No, they won’t,” say all the editors, literary theorists, and authors who know more than I do—which is all of them.
“Shit, guys. I’m blogging here. I’m broke and I need the money. I might cry,” I mope.
How many novels now rock the first-person protagonist’s narrative voice? It’s almost the new boring. First-person is the new narrative black dog.
“Okay. You’ve got us there,” all of the aforementioned, exceedingly skilled specialists admit, “but we’re still right about everything else!”
“You guys aren’t recognizing my desperate misery and need to be loved financially at all.”
Vocabulary: Go Hard
Without sounding like an effusive idiot with an unfortunate mental disorder who’s busily dispensing word salad, of course.
Stephen Fry’s script for the brilliant The Hippopotamus is loquacious, employs an elevated vocabulary, and is bloody fantastic. (He’s a tall guy with a large bonce, so I’m blaming that.)
I was convinced I would hate this film the moment I saw the marketing, but since it starred Fry, I was desperately curious to see how bad it was—because Fry and bad art don’t mix. As usual, my intuition and judgment were completely off. It wasn’t even a little bit bad. Consequently, I was late for whatever I was doing next. Sleep, probably.
“Well, at least you’ve been working on your self-awareness, Long, but make yourself scarce, you miserable hack,” say all the literary and intellectual adjudicators who have it over me in every way that matters.
Fry’s The Hippopotamus also contains the best use of the phrase ‘this imbecile cult’ that has ever been uttered in cinematic history or any other kind of history.
“Good to see you’re occasionally right about something, Long, you buffoon. But get out anyway before we call the police.”
If you’re going to write a novel or a script, write it for people who want to learn as part of their enjoyment. René Girard says this is your job anyway, and he’s smarter than I am, too. Although, Girard is a bit of a preachy moral didact and mad cultist in the spirit of the Disturbing Dane, so let’s stick with Fry.
People read first and foremost for pleasure and entertainment, and no one enjoys being preached to or treated in a pompous, didactic manner.
“Okay, Long, so that’s at least two things you have been right about… He’s in here, Constable!”
Squeeze the vocabulary in there anyway. Go full Fry, as it were. I don’t think that anyone should care at all about readers who don’t like a few—or even more than a few—big words.
We don’t want to go around sounding like a Cambridge Dictionary from 1890 (okay, Fry can do this, but don’t try it at home), but we also want wordsmithing to include lustrous vocabulary. Psychological science tells us authoritatively that while our numeric and spatial cognition decline after 50, our linguistic abilities and crystallized knowledge increase well into our 60s.
So you know I will keep writing until I am as tall as Fry. (In about four and a half inches.)
So trade, buy, and sell your literary wares using a high-value and expensive lingua franca.
This is especially true for novels aimed at adolescents. Even more so, in that case, because kids are now likely to be reading on their iPiddle or Candlepod and can just look things up on Boogle in five seconds flat. That includes the kids in their 50s.
Style and Novums in Comic Sci-Fi
Douglas Adams is not often referenced as a paragon of literary style, but Life, the Universe, and Everything is quite spectacular from a style perspective.
Comic sci-fi is hard to write as literature because science fiction has a long-standing (and undeserved) reputation for not being literary. Moreover, and less obviously, ‘hard’ sci-fi novums (scientifically accurate concepts à la Arthur C. Clarke) are elements of most SF (except for space opera, which often minimizes them in the foreground of the mise-en-scène), and they are not easy to combine with comedy and comedic prose.
One can easily make a joke out of space elevators and time machines, but trying to combine the right amount of astronomically or biologically accurate concepts—at an appropriate level of detail and with few words—with humor, without chewing the furniture on the bridge of the spaceship (as many 2000s TV space operas did), is a difficult feat.
I love magical realism, and it’s much easier to do than comedic sci-fi for this very reason. If you have actual magic, you don’t need to worry about the pesky novums and technical accuracy that come with deploying Arthur C. Clarke’s dictum about technological magic. (Any sufficiently advanced technology will look like magic.)
Mixing novums, hard science (or some science), and humor is not impossible, but it requires a lot more work than casting spells. Magic is just magic. One can wave one’s hands, say ‘abracadabra’ and ‘voila,’ and no one in the audience is going to say, ‘That’s bosh!’
SF novums with Clarkean magic are not so easy, and making them work with truly good humor is far more cognitively demanding. It may not even be a very good idea. Not many comic SF writers try to do this in any genre or medium. Douglas Adams’ HHGTTG, Besson’s Fifth Element, and Seth MacFarlane’s scripts for The Orville are rare examples, and MacFarlane and Besson avoid sciency novums as much as possible, focusing on space-opera story arcs, character psychology, and interpersonal relations for a TV audience.
Of course, psychology is a science, which does make Besson and MacFarlane look good.
“They are good, Long, you hacky, pretentious tit… Sergeant! The miscreant is hiding in here!”
Conclusion
Err… so there?
“Quickly, Constable! Grab him!!”
“Time to leave, Watson.”
Prompts were “A zany looking comedic space monster slobbering on a space warrior.” and “A zany looking comedic space monster kissing a space warrior using its lips.” WHY IS THERE SO MUCH FRENCH KISSING???????????!!!
