Amazon has something new called Amazon Shorts
Short fiction and essays for fifty cents. (It doesn’t say specifically on the site, but I’ve read that the author gets 20 cents, and Amazon gets 30 cents. This may or may not be true.) Author John Scalzi has written a good review of the concept.
I downloaded an essay by Terry Brooks entitled, “Why I Write About Elves.” I also downloaded an essay by Robert Silverberg entitled, “Building Alternative Realities.” I really had no idea both articles would be approaching the same idea from different directions. Silverberg focused on creating Alternative History. Changing some event in history and extrapolating the results.
I’ll excerpt one paragraph from this long essay.
One of the earliest such tales of alternative reality that I know of is Edward Everett Hale’s “Hands Off,” published in Harper’s Magazine in 1898. The one little twist here is the assumption that Joseph, the son of Jacob, was never sold into slavery in Egypt, but, instead, had escaped the slave traders and returned to his father’s camp in the desert. Whereupon — without the shrewd mind of Joseph to guide its government — Egypt was conquered by Canaanite barbarians, who went on to engulf the rest of the ancient world. Judaism died out, the great culture of Greece never had a chance to emerge, Rome was crushed, and a reign of “lust, brutality, terror, cruelty, carnage, famine, agony, horror” descended on humanity, until…
Silverberg finishes that last sentence, but I won’t. And I’m going to go in search of that book, even though I already know everything that’s going to happen. He goes on to explain how he went about creating one of his own alternative realities.
Terry Brooks discusses the exact same thing…though he discusses alternate realities that are formed on the foundation of magic…
More often than not, fantasy takes place in an imaginary world. It relies on imaginary creatures and that all-important element of magic. In order for this to be possible and for the book to succeed, there must be an acceptance of both characters and story that, however odd or foreign to a reader’s real life experience, allows for a willing suspension of disbelief. Within the parameters of the world the writer creates, everything must hang together in a reasonable, cohesive way.
Many people think writing fantasy is easy, because you get to make your world up and aren’t bound to the facts. But you have to create your own facts, and stick to them, because if you’re inconsistent your reader will catch you.
The same is true with science fiction. You may have a little flexibility in what will be possible 200 years from now, or what the world might be like if Lincoln hadn’t been shot. But if you have no idea the progression of events that leads to your reality, your reader is likely to notice, and not believe it.
Most upsetting about the two essays is that Robert Silverberg in his describes a book that sounds a little bit like one I have been working on for a few years. I’m sure the concept is treated differently, but now I’m going to have to read that book and make sure.
