Where is...?

It gives you a happy glow to know your characters, to understand the evil plot you’re going to involve them in, even to the point of smugness that you know how it ends, and no-one else does.

A slight creasing of the brow comes into play when you try and decide where you want all this action to take place.

The city you live in? One you’ve visited? Another country you’ve thought about? Another world?

The city you live in is easy: you just go to places your characters will. For one you’ve visited, you can drag out photos or dig into your memory. Another country… hmm, hard, but not difficult given the internet. Stephen King wrote a spot-on description of an Asian city he’d never been to from research. For another world, you’ve got to create it: Axial tilt, distance from a particularly classified sun, flora, fauna, seasons, weather, temperatures, whether other close celestial bodies are possible, minerology… the list is long. Of course, you can simply apply Earth-like categories and give your planet a new name, but then you’ve got to deal with the history of the place, politics, perhaps militarism.

For sci-fi writers, this is a part of their work; it’s assumed the story is futuristic so anything is possible. For fantasy writers, it doesn’t matter so much because most fantasies are medievalistic – if there’s such a word – and technology isn’t such an issue. Science Fantasy, however, creates unique problems all on its lonesome.

How do you reconcile fantasy creatures with modern technology? Alternative reality novels deal with it in two ways: accepting creatures of myth live amongst us openly and explain the ‘coming out’, or accepting mythological beings exist, but are hidden and intend to remain so for one reason or another.

Popular supernatural fiction maintains the latter: that ordinary Joe Public would panic if vampires and werewolves were real and so create a hidden world where the characters can play. The one major problem with this is technology, especially seeker technology: satellites, infra-red, sonar, forensics, a Mark 1 eyeball, digital cameras, all put the squeeze on the hidden worlds.

What will we do when someone, or a group, prove categorically, without question that supernatural beings do or do not exist? Does it matter?

Well, yeah, to me it does. Realism is important to me. If I’m writing about a modern world with myths running around, I want the reader to believe it’s possible. Flying beasties are obviously at the mercy of satellites; blood suckers leave victims and enough of them in one area will cause police to investigate the cluster; weres thundering through the forests risk hunters, campers, naturalists and scientists, especially if they leave something of themselves behind, like fur, to be examined.

It could be that I’m being too pedantic, but I’ve always thought that to make fiction work, you have to stick as close to the truth as possible – with a speculation thrown in. The reader will take that up and I think that’s what makes writers like Stephen King so successful: it could happen.

This brings me back to where a novel should be set, or, more precisely, the problem I’m having with one of my own pieces. Should my flying mythical beasties be vulnerable to modern technology in this world even as they struggle to stay hidden? Should I set it on another planet? Or should I ignore the possibility of detection all together and give the beasties stealth capabilities? Is ‘the ability to wrap shadows around them’ realistic?

Readers are canny people; I suspect I’m gonna have to be cleverer than I think I am to find an acceptable solution.