How to Begin an SF or Fantasy story

There is, I think, only one really good beginning to an SF of Fantasy story. It goes like this:

"Reader, imagine this false thing to be true, for just as long as this story lasts. When you're done, then maybe, just maybe, you'll have a bit more wisdom about the world outside our heads. But certainly you'll have a fun time."

Of course, there are a million ways of doing this. "In a hole in a hill there lived a Hobbit" gets the idea across pretty well--we know there aren't Hobbits, but doesn't it sound fun (and maybe there's some Hobbitness in all of us.)

So does "Hwaet! We Gar-Dena in gear-dagum / [th]eod cyninga [th]rym gefrunon" (Loosely: "Lo! We have heard tales of the Spear-Danes, in days of ancient years / those princely-kings.")

Or: "Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun." Facts are aluded to, but the big emphasis is fantasy: there are things going on in the galaxy, interesting, fascinating, unimaginable things, and we provincial earthlings are just left out of the loop.

Or: "Now is the winter of our discontent / turned to glorious summer by the son of York."

Or: "No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intellegences greater than mans and yet as mortal as his own."

Or, by the same author: "The Time Traveler (for so it will be convienent to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us."

Or even "One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug."

Or, perhaps the most honest (and trenchantly political of them all), Robert Heinlein's declaration: "Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith."



None of these statements prove their premises. This isn't Science Fiction in the strictest form, arguing that something must happen or will happen based on technological advances or societal evolution. This is pure fantasy: "Once upon a time there was" when we know very well there wasn't, and almost certainly never will be.

It is also, I think, what everyone wants when they get a story. Here are words, outside of the reader's immediate experience. It's no less true to make any claim than to say, for instance, "On the morning of Friday, December the 13th, Joe Smith stopped by Starbucks on his way to work." Both are imagined, unreal. Both rely, in the end, on the reader's curiosity. Fantasy just admits the fact.

But exploring these ideas, as any reader of SF or fantasy knows, is as fun as figuring out what it is that makes people tick--probably because the two categories overlap. More fun, really, since psychology is always reductive ("your problem is simply that...") whereas fiction suggests possibilites and often leaves open gaps--the reader gains experiences; psychology merely posits theories and abstractions.



And, fortunately, this mode of thinking--honestly positing falsities in order to suggest realities, is not dead. One of the Nebula-award nominated short stories, "The Ray-Gun: A Love Story," begins:

"This is a story about a ray-gun. The ray-gun will not be explained except to say, "It shoots rays."


It's fantasy, but as the story develops it is also about psychology and ethics and literary criticism and love and heroism and who knows what else. But really, that was all in there from the beginning--after all, we were warned that this was a story about a ray-gun.