Wonder; What to do with it
This is an article I wrote for Outland back in 2003 - it points up some of the thinking behind the Martians in Broken Angels.
There's this problem with fear - it just doesn't last. Like all emotions, it's a fleeting assemblage of chemical reactions to circumstance. And if circumstances don't change, we tend to get bored. The first time I ever flew, my palms were sweaty with nervous anticipation - now there are times I don't even look up from my book when the plane leaves the ground. The first time I ran into real, in-the-flesh, tropical giant spiders - hung up in the webs they'd spun between jungle tree trunks, facing the sea as if waiting for an unwary ship to put in - they sent a cool chill up and down my spine, and I couldn't stop thinking about them for hours afterwards. A week later, they were old hat, barely worth pointing out as we passed them by. Graham Greene once remarked, from personal experience, that even the fear of being killed in a combat situation eventually degrades to boredom, given enough exposure.
For science fiction and fantasy writers, this is bad news. Part of the SF/F brief has always been to invoke a sense of wonder, and, if you think about it, wonder is the flip side of fear. Every breathtaking view from on high owes its existence to a long drop somewhere. Every frisson of wonder carries with it an existential plunge into the depths, as we confront our own miniscule lack of importance in the grand scheme of things. You can't look out into deep space without simultaneously feeling the wonder of its enormity and the terror of falling into it. The problem, for SF/F writers, is that the more we rub up against that duality, the more commmonplace both ends of it start to seem.
Take vampires. Once the twin font of terror (as we shrank from the threat they posed to our lives and immortal souls) and wonder (as we contemplated the idea of eternal life), they now get the shit kicked out of them on a weekly basis by a petite teenage black belt in karate and valleyspeak irony. Anne Rice's Vampire Lestat, once himself a wondrous and terrifying figure, tracks the mystery of vampire origin back across time and space with the cool aplomb of an undead Indiana Jones and then, worst of all possible scenarios, solves the damn thing. Disaster! After that, no amount of cataclysmic confrontation between the various vampire characters can mask the enormous letdown of the Unknowable becoming abruptly, nakedly and rather prosaically Known. We're left with Blade I and II (and for all I know, III to IX), and slaughter no gorier than you'd find on the average human battlefield. The wonder is gone, and so is the fear. Yeah, yeah, bloodsucking fiends. Yawn.
Vampires are not the only monsters subject to this rampant devaluation in the currency of wonder. M John Harrison tracks a similar decline in the potential of Twentieth Century Fox's Alien, from the shadowy and almost invincible monster of the first movie to the eminently killable (though, for my money, equally scary) creatures of the second. And by the third outing, I might add, this thing that had crawled up out of our deepest freudian nightmares was fucking advertising Pepsi Cola in the intermission. Similarly, the (largely) invisible and implacable Predator turns out significantly easier to understand and kill second time around, and, perhaps wisely, Predator 3 never appears at all. Alien invaders in general degenerate from the unstoppable (by us at any rate) terror of H G Wells' heat ray wielding, blood sucking (yep, them too), "Ulla!!!" shrilling army of Martians to the hi-tech but eminently defeatable bad guys of Independence Day and then finally to the point where they can be seen off by a small town homestead family armed with a kitchen knife, a baseball bat and a bit of old time religious faith. Hmmm... the less said about that the better. James Cameron's unstoppable Terminator managed to sidestep the decline by re-inventing itself as a malevolent liquid something, while the original monster was downgraded to gentle giant/family retainer status and a handful of camp comic turns, but this is an honourable exception. Mostly, the process described above is irreversible, perhaps best symbolised in shorthand thus: the engimatic black slab in 2001; A Space Odyssey crops up in an episode of Futurama, orbiting Saturn with an Out of Order sticker slapped across it.
Now, this is not to say that most of the books, movies and TV programmes listed above are not immensely entertaining in themselves (apart from Signs, that is); but what it does mean is that your chances as an SF/F writer of sending a chill up your reader's spine are subject to an inexorable law of diminishing returns and a market flooded with repetitive product. Giant killer insects? Seen it. Skeletal killer robots? Seen it. Scaly lizard aliens. Seen it. OK, invisible scaly lizard aliens. Yeah, yeah, that too. Corpses re-animated by a chemical pollutant and/or shadowy corporate/military interests. Seen it. Alien intelligences that take over humans through a variety of insidious processes and- SEEN it! Aliens who abduct much loved family members with the help of shadowy government conspira- Come on, you're not trying.
The pressure is on, all the time, to show your audience something they haven't seen before or, this being close to impossible these days, something they may have seen before but from an angle they've never before had their vision wrenched to. And to stand any chance at all of beating the odds and producing that spinal shiver of wonder and fear, you have to follow one basic rule - LESS is MORE.
The Less is More rule of SF/F Wonder Induction can be broken down, I think, into three key sub-precepts:
1) Speculate, Don't Explain - there is nothing more guaranteed to suffocate a sense of wonder than a million year old, thousand kilometre long spacecraft whose purpose and propulsion system are both known and explained in exhaustive detail. You find them a lot in SF novels, and the thing that kills my interest about seven times out of ten is the stolid grey analytical competence with which the discovering characters react, quantify and transcend. By the end, they might as well be assembling flatpack furniture. Difficult and trying, maybe, but not something that sends icy existential shivers up and down your spine. If I want a stolid analytical approach to the unknown, I can always read New Scientist.
This precept is illustrated beautifully by, of all things, Star Trek IV - the Journey Home. One of the great strengths of this movie (and what made it stand out against the rather weary antics of its sister films) was the lack of any clear explanation for the immense, ancient-looking thing that glides out of deep space at the beginning of the movie and wreaks havoc on planet earth because it can't find any whales to talk to. You never do discover what it is or where it's from (the whales certainly aren't telling) - it just demonstrates its unguessable power and then goes away again, leaving us with a huge, dark sense of how much we don't yet know and haven't yet seen.
2) Never Look 'em In The Eyes - monsters should be allowed to creep up on you. Re-living the early gaming triumph of DOOM on PSOne last year, I was struck by how genuinely frightening the scenario still is. It isn't the graphics, which these days look pretty feeble, it's the noises. Play DOOM on your own in a darkened room and pretty soon the back of your neck starts to feel cold. The game is getting through to you at a basic, visceral level, and the way it does this is to make you afraid, not of the beefy little pink demons you can see running at you, but of whatever it is out there that's making that growling, grinding, clawing, scratching noise somewhere just out of sight.
If you're going to touch your reader like that, you can't meet the scary/wondrous subject of your writing face on. Or at least, not til very near the end, and even then I wouldn't recommend it. What you catch sight of gliding past out of the corner of your eye is infinitely more frightening than anything you can see clear and dead centre. What you can see clearly, you can also shoot, and given the hi-tech armouries with which SF heroes are generally equipped, you're likely to do some substantial damage. And demonstrably damaged monsters aren't scary. As Arnie himself would have, if it bleeds, you can kill it. And if you can kill it, hey you're the hero, get on and kill it, willya.
3) Quit While You're Ahead - If, as Graham Greene says, even expecting to be killed for real can get dull, what chance has a writer got? Repetition will wear away your impact like soap. Keep coming back to vampires, you end up with utterly predictable plot concepts and a lot of ennervating gore. Keep coming back to the Alien, you end up with something even Winona Ryder can kill. Solution - don't keep coming back. In fact, don't come back at all. Preserve your sense of fear and wonder. Just leave it out there, half known, pointing (maybe) to the dark bulk of an even greater mystery, and then move on, find another angle. Let the reader and their imagination do the rest.