Unnatural Language

According to a well known dictum of the genre, the first sentence of any science fiction story should instantly invoke the world of the narrative and no other world. Take down your chosen volume, which we will imagine to be in a plain cover so that the normal marketing signals are unavailable. If the first sentence is simply unintelligible, although it contains nothing but perfectly recognisable words of your mother tongue, read on in hope. Either you are on the right shelf or you have picked up by accident a book of academic literary criticism. A grounding in this subject will be invaluable to you in certain areas of modern sf—invaluable as a background in mechanical engineering might have been thirty years ago. If the first sentence reads ‘the cat sat on the mat’ read on and beware. You may have entered that copyeditor's nightmare, the rigorously imagined world. You think you know what a ‘cat’ is but you don't. It could be a foodstuff or a marital aid, or the term for a particularly esoteric degree of kinship in the imagined social structure. It could be (equally) a typographical error: it was supposed to be a czryt sitting on the mat.

Delany's dictum sounds like a familiar formula, a test that could be applied to any kind of fiction. ‘All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion’—there is Anna Karenina in a sentence. So long as Tolstoy is not cheating this is going to be a novel about broken homes. But in sf the game is more intense, more obsessive and much more game-like. If the book is to be about a world in which schizophrenia is normal, or war is unknown, or everybody is immortal, the challenge is to write every sentence, construct each scrap of dialogue as if in the Noel Coward-style party game where a player has to perform some ordinary action mimed in the manner of the word, the word that we are trying to guess. Never by so much as an adjective must the writer admit to knowledge of (for instance) a world where organised aggression is commonplace.