The dull machinery of a believable future

People who do not read much science fiction assume the genre is about the big arrival. The ship on the horizon, the alien in the doorway, the moment a voice from somewhere else says hello. I have spent two decades reading the stuff and a fair part of one writing it, and I can tell you the big arrival is the easy bit. Anyone can write the alien. What separates a future you believe from a future you tolerate is everything that happens in the ninety minutes before it lands.

The question I always ask

When I read a new novel, I do not ask whether the idea is clever. Clever is cheap. I ask a duller question: who fixes the toilets. Somewhere on that gleaming vessel there is a person whose whole job is the water, and if the writer has thought about that person, I will follow them anywhere. If they have not, the ship is a stage set, and I can see the plywood.

A colony does not run on courage. It runs on filtration, on rosters, on the argument about whose turn it is to check the seals. The heroism, when it comes, is built on top of a thousand small competences that nobody thanked anyone for.

Boredom is a load-bearing wall

I read instruction manuals for pleasure and I have stopped apologising for it. A good manual is a small monument to somebody having thought a problem all the way through, and thinking a problem all the way through is the entire job of writing a future. The reader will forgive you a great deal, but they will not forgive you a world that only works when the plot is looking at it.

The reader will forgive you a great deal, but they will not forgive a world that only works when the plot is watching.

So I write the forms. I write the shift that ends late. I write the part where the miracle machine needs a part that is out of stock and someone has to drive four hours to get it. It is not glamorous. It is the wall the rest of the house leans on.

The person inside the science

There is a rule I keep taped, in effect if not in fact, to the inside of my head: the science has to hold, and so does the person standing inside it. You can invent any engine you like. What you cannot invent is a human being who never gets tired, never resents the roster, never wants to go home. The moment your future has people in it who behave like people, the ray guns can be as silly as you please. Nobody checks the physics of a story they believe. They only check the physics of a story that has already lost them.

I think this is why the futures that last are rarely the shiniest ones. They are the ones where you can smell the coffee going cold and hear someone two decks down complaining about the overtime. That is not a failure of imagination. That is the imagination doing its actual work, which is to make somewhere impossible feel, for a few hundred pages, like somewhere you might have to get up and go to work.

The numbers that hold a story up are everything in Nine Kilometres Down: three trapped miners, lamps for thirty hours, water for six days, and air that will go bad sooner.