Writing the Surreal

First things first. Welcome to my soapbox where I write about my thoughts on everything science fiction!

I’m excited to bring my thoughts out and create meaningful dialogue with my fellow readers and cinema-goers.

I chose this introductory topic to show my appreciation for all of our science fiction creators. Writers and filmmakers strive to give life to a technology that may never exist, a world that may never be, in a story told by people who never were.

What better way to jump start this soapbox then to ponder the intricacies of such powerful storytelling and world building?

I will be the first to say: creating science fiction is HARD. Balancing fact and fiction is the epitome of a tight-rope act. I have two science fiction novels in process that I’ve been working on for nearly 6 years!

So, what is writing science fiction? In my opinion, it is the act of realizing the surreal.

Arthur C. Clarke, famed author and futurist, proposed three laws regarding future technology.

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Inherently, even modern day scientific breakthroughs contain an element of surrealism. Pushing the label on our own perceptions of what is possible and what is impossible.

When even the real world pushes the boundaries of our perceptions of reality it creates a door in which our imaginations can appear as no less genuine.

When we write science fiction we are indeed pushing the label, even to a degree that such ideas may appear surreal. The difference is, like in the movie Inception (a movie I will be writing on), as creators we seek to integrate these surreal aspects of our fictional worlds with the audience’s suspension of disbelief.

That, in itself, is a powerful concept!

To bridge the surreal with the real. To pull your audience into a dream they willingly forget is fiction.

Surrealism is the state in which something appears fantastical or illogical and yet so often in the real world we witness surreal happenings. Don’t believe me? Just take a gander at quantum mechanics! Try to simply understand the near paradoxical nature of the Big Bang.

At the end of the day, reality is in the eye of the beholder and often truth is stranger than fiction.

So what is it like to write the surreal?

Immensely rewarding. We get to create a new reality, with its own rules and abstractions. We challenge others to open their minds to this alternate reality and in so doing, reveal a truth within themselves.

Welcome to the world of science and the world of science fiction where science can become fiction and fiction can become science.