Hi, this month’s craft post for paid subscribers is looking at using science to inspire your stories. There’s a warm-up research exercise and a writing prompt to get you creating new work inspired by scientific discoveries.
What I love about sci-fi is it's such a broad genre and encompasses so many different elements and ideas. It's not just spaceships and aliens and many writers are doing very interesting things in the sci-fi short fiction world — such as Ted Chiang, Ken Liu and Tania Hershman — who all use science to inspire stories, but many of them are set in what wouldn't typically be conceived of as a sci-fi world.
“Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.” ― Ted Chiang
Many of the earliest writers of science fiction, such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, we’re scientists but you don't have to be a working scientist, or even knowledgeable about science, to write in this genre. It's all about picking a concept and a theme to explore through it and going deep. So that’s what we’re going to do in there warm-up exercise and follow up writing prompt.