Like all fiction, science fiction rests on the four sturdy legs of theme, character, style, and plot. For practical purposes, it includes all stories and novels in which ‘the strange’ is the dominant characteristic. Sf's particular problems result from the author's need to make this element – the strange – acceptable to the reader.

Theme

In the broadest sense, theme is the story's central concern. In a science fiction story, for example, the theme might be the effects of a system of embalming so improved that the dead could be distinguished from the living only with difficulty. (This was the theme of my story, ‘The Packerhaus Method’, in which the chief character's father was proven dead only by the fact that he could not get his cigar to draw.) Notice that the theme has nothing to do with what happens to the character. Theme is what the story is about.

In science fiction, it is imperative that the theme of each story be fresh or treated from a new angle. If the theme is not original or given a fresh treatment, it cannot be ‘strange’. The most common – and the most disastrous – error beginning sf writers make is to assume that editors want more stories on the same themes as the one they have already published. The writer reads the collected works of Isaac Asimov and Jack Williamson, for example, and tries to write a robot story like theirs. His story cannot be ‘like theirs’ because their stories were fresh and original when they appeared; an imitation cannot be either.

On the other hand, it is still possible to write original robot stories. In ‘It's Very Clean’, I wrote about a girl who posed as a robot because she could not find work as a human being. I like to think that was original. In ‘Eyebem’, I wrote about a robot forest ranger, and in ‘Going to the Beach’, I described an encounter with a robot streetwalker down on her luck.

The trick (and I think it one of the most difficult in writing) is to see things from a new angle. I have found three questions useful in stimulating story ideas.