Steven Barnes breaks down science fiction's three core games: "what if" (introducing impossible events), "if only" (alternate history), and "if this goes on." In his novel Lion's Blood, Socrates doesn't drink the hemlock, changing history's course. Readers don't demand accuracy, just plausibility.
If you're going to write science fiction and science fiction is a subset of fantasy that has both internal and external rules, then it behooves you to understand both the internal rules of science fiction and the external rules of the world that it relates to. Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein said that there were three primary rules of science fiction and there are three primary games of science fiction. And those games would be what if, if only, and if this goes on. Okay, let's talk about the different types of movies that these are different types of stories. A what if story is a story that says, you know, what if aliens arrived in large numbers? You know, it's what if anything? What if Lincoln. No, no, what if X happens to Y? Something that is outside the ordinary box of consensual reality or history, the way we understand it, or the current run of technology? If only, if only Lincoln hadn't been assassinated. In other words, all alternate history novels go in that direction. If only this had happened instead of that. About five years ago, I published an alternate history novel called Lion's Blood that's set in a world in which Africa developed a technological civilization prior to Europe and colonized the Americas, bringing white slaves here. I can't imagine why I was entertained right in there. The game of alternate history is a very, very specific game. You get to change one event, one fact, and everything else that happens has to arise out of that. Now, the point of departure from our timeline that I chose is that Socrates doesn't drink the hemlock. Everything else rises out of that. Now, here's the thing. There are two different ways that you can do an alternate history. One, you can actually change an event and then start from there and just kind of say, well, this is how I think things would come out. The other is that you can start with an end point, which is what I did. I wanted an endpoint of the relative positions of technological and social development of Africa and Europe being reversed. And I was trying to figure out how to make that happen. Now, is it actually possible for me to come up with a scenario in which this would happen? Of course not. Any more than you can predict where a leaf will fall on the ground if you drop it from the top of a 10 story building, you cannot make that prediction because the chaos theory simply gets too complex unless you're in a vacuum. However, what you can say is, there's a leaf on the ground. It fell from that 10 story window up there. Is that plausible? And people say, yeah, it's plausible that that could have happened. And that's all that I'm asking people to do. Is it plausible that it could have happened? I'm not saying that it did happen because if they can believe that it's plausible that it could have happened then they're saying okay I can buy that this could have happened if I cut you some slack if I say okay I will grant this could have happened. What do I get for that? And what I say to them is I will tell you a story that you've never heard. And human beings love storytelling. They love storytelling for some very specific reasons. There have been studies that suggest that people who are waiting in emergency rooms to find out whether their loved ones are going to live or die if they're reading nonfiction they have one set of reactions. If they're reading fiction while they wait they have a healthier and better adjusted better balanced set of reactions. Why might this happen? In order to understand that one thing that I always.
