I remember Bob Heinlein talking about a writer who
served up the same basic plots over and over, sometimes 'filing off
the serial numbers' of a story he liked changing the lines a bit and
then he 'owned it'. I have always shied away from this method of
writing, even when people writing about writing have stated that
there are only a limited number of basic types of plot, and almost
all stories will fit to these basic types. I figure there are going
to be no more Heinlein stories, since the guy is deceased. How about
filing off the serial numbers and changing the lines a bit on some of
his stories? The fact of the matter is that you can't copyright
Ideas, only the form in which they are expressed. This of course
smacks of plagiarism but consider for a minute what would happen if
plagiarism was in fact a criminal offence. If plagiarism extended
copyright to the extent of protecting ideas then any idea in science
fiction, once used (and published!) would no longer be available to
any other writer to use as his or her work and separate works which
were published that did use the same or similar ideas could face
years of legal wrangling to determine to whom the idea belongs. If
one work used the concept of 'gravity plating' for example, then no
other work except by the same author(s) could use that or a
substantially similar concept. This is verging on the ridiculous! The
non-legal definition of plagiarism is not clear and it is this
concept of protecting ideas which makes it unclear, so we must beware
of taking large chunks of another person’s work and claiming them
as our own, or indeed whole works and simply changing a few proper
names and so on. But, using an idea which is already present in the
language of science fiction is not a crime, so long as the actual use
of the idea is in your own words and your own story.
It is Heinlein's ideas that make his stories so
interesting, in many cases the plots themselves are somewhat weak,
but the ideas presented make the story worth reading. Clearly much of
the technology he describes is defunct. Stories written in the 1940's
and 50's no longer stand up technically in the 21st century. For
example, in one story he describes an atomic powered 'space ship'
which is basically an orbital lifting vehicle powered by steam,
super-heated by a fission pile. The ship is cobbled together by a
bunch of teenagers and an 'old space hand'. We now know this would
never have worked due to the weight of the shielding that would have
been required to prevent the occupants being irradiated. In another
story a ship of a much larger scale is described, also using the same
basic principle but of sufficient size to carry the necessary
shielding for the passengers to at least survive in the short term.
The danger of radioactive contamination is such that such a ship
would never be permitted, unless either these dangers are solved, or
nobody gives a shit about the danger. Another classic Heinlein story
involves a 'tunnel in the sky' which is basically a Stargate concept
not dissimilar to the movie of that name.
Once of the main problems which has been holding
me back in my writing of science fiction is the feeling that it is
necessary to always come up with something, some concept that is
completely new, never been done before, and such ideas are few and
far between. By the 21st century, most if not all possible ideas have
been explored, often in several ways and differing approaches.
Science Fiction has become more mainstream, that is to say that the
story has become more significant than the ideas which are explored.
Which in my view makes it possible incorporate old ideas in the form
of the genre, with good plot and characters. In much the same way a
writer may approach writing a detective story, or a western, the
ideas and concepts of these genres are basically dictated by what has
gone before and it is only the implementation that differs from
example to example.
So how would we go about 'ripping off' Heinlein,
without being plagiarist, and which stories or ideas are the most
suitable to be 'updated'?
Let's look at '
Tunnel in the Sky' in more detail.
The ideas behind this is the basic precursor to the Stargate concept;
a planar region of space-time is by means of some sort of machinery,
connected directly to a similar planar region of space-time, usually
light-years removed. This story actually pre-dated several academic
papers derived from Einstein’s special and general theories of
relativity, where some solutions to his equations implied that a
traversable stable wormhole could be created, given sufficient energy
and a source of negative mass. Subsequently a whole new field of
physics has been developed to theoretically describe the physics of
wormholes. I have mentioned the Stargate movie previously, more
recently we have the concept of 'Runcible Gates' described by the
author Neal Asher, and probably other variations on the theme by
numerous other writers. This is to say that the 'Stargate' concept
has become part of the language of science fiction and indeed also
the language of theoretical physics. Asher's Runcible gates are more
or less identical in effect to those gates found in Heinlein's story.
So basically there is no problem using this idea, since it has become
part of the language of science and fiction.
So what about the plot of the story?
The basic plot is that a group of high school
students are taking a frontier survival class taught by a veteran.
Their final exam involves being dropped by means of a star gate onto
another planet with only what they can carry and expected to survive
for 10 days or two weeks. The survivors are picked up by means of
another gate set several kilometres away from the initial drop. Only
this time it goes wrong, the recovery gate does not open, due to
'solar interference', and the group is marooned for months. The lead
character becomes 'mayor' of the primitive village that they
establish. There are various trials and tribulations when the kids
assume rescue is not coming, and with negligible resources they do in
fact survive after a fashion. The premise is that even a bunch of
teenagers can whip an alien environment and survive with only minimal
losses given the basic appropriate training and moral turpitude.
Echoes of filed off serial numbers and altered
lines here? Perhaps those who have read 'Lord of the flies' or other
similar stories will find elements of the plot recognisable, Heinlein
did say in his writing that there are no new plots. But is the plot
worth ripping off (again). Perhaps, perhaps not.
Given that the Stargate concept is now accepted as
part of the language of science fiction, what other concepts are also
now part of that language? Well certainly the '
Star trek Universe' or
series of series have added a number of 'concepts' to the language of
science fiction. Most notable of these would probably be the 'phaser'
and 'photon torpedoes' and the 'transporter'. Star trek conveniently
glosses over the problems involved in creating artificial gravity,
instead of ships which require spin to provide artificial gravity
using centripetal force, the deck plates of all ships in the Star
trek Universe magically produce a one directional and variable
gravitational field apparently by electro-mechanical means. The
'transporter' concept is an interesting one, in that it is basically
predicated on matter-transportation from one place to another by
means of some electro-mechanical process, something that has also
been used elsewhere in science fiction. For example, the movie 'The
Fly' where the inventor of a matter-transport machine gets merged
with an intruding fly. Safe to say then that 'matter-transport' is
now part of the language of science fiction. A variation on the theme
of matter-transport has been used in several novels, in the form of a
person (or animal!) being able through the power of their mind to
teleport themselves and or others between locations in space-time.
Another concept that Star trek has gifted to the
language of science fiction would have to be 'warp-drive' or
'warp-bubble'. The basic concept is that a warp-bubble is created
around a space ship, then space-time is compressed in front of the
ship and expanded behind it, thus allowing the ship to travel at a
velocity faster-than-light. The actual physics of this is far from
proven, unlike wormhole theories which have a basis in Einstein’s
equations, warp-theory seems to be completely fantasy, however in his
1994 paper
Alcubierre formally proposed this concept, in his metric
the relativistic effects, such as time dilation do not apply. One
aspect of these Star trek theories is in fact realistic, warp-bubbles
require the use of anti-matter as a source of energy, and anti-matter
has indeed been detected in real physical experiments. Unfortunately,
at present it would take millions of years to collect a sufficient
amount of it to be useful in this respect.
An older concept, in the same vein, is
'hyperspace', often characterised as a region or property of
space-time which when entered will allow the spaceship to travel
faster-than-light, there is no real world theoretical basis for the
'hyperspace' concept. However, recent developments in theoretical
physics require that higher orders of dimensions in space-time must
exist mathematically in order to describe quantum mechanical objects
and behaviours that exist. It is not then beyond the realms of
possibility that some sub-set of these higher orders of dimensions
might not represent something like the 'hyperspace' concept.
Heinlein has also looked at the possibility of
higher order dimensions, for example in his book '
The Number of theBeast' where he postulates that the four space-time dimensions we
experience are in-fact a sub-set of six available dimensions, and if
a machine could be made to switch between these available dimensions
it would not only be possible to travel faster-than-light, but also
to travel to 'alternate dimensions' and to travel forwards and
backwards in time. The concept of 'alternate universes' has been
much used in science fiction, though usually the writers spend little
or no time actually explaining the conceptual theory, and just get on
with the story.
The concept of time
travelling is very popular in Science Fiction, so much so that most
people will be familiar with 'The Grandfather Paradox', where a time
traveller travels back in time and impregnates his grandmother, thus
becoming his own grandfather. Many entertaining plots have been
developed using loops through time or loops in time. Again the means
of travelling is usually by virtue of some electro-mechanical device
the theory of which is rarely explained in any detail. It is my view
that 'time-travel' has been 'done to death' in the genre. However, in
each case it is done by means of the hypothetical electro-mechanical
machine, whereas in theory the only way to achieve time-travel
currently would be by means of two '
Krasnikov Tubes' (a type of
wormhole), one outgoing and one side by side returning, which when
traversed in the reverse direction would give rise to time travelling
in that the traveller would arrive before having left, the temporal
displacement being directly proportional to the length of the tubes.
There is some discussion as to whether there must be some currently
unknown physical law which would act to prevent this, a sort of 'Law
of Conservation of Time'.
In summary I would say that the state of science
fiction today is that the language, as of that of any other genre of
writing, is well established and there is no shame in using that
language to tell a story, so long as that story is sufficiently
entertaining that someone wants to read it. It doesn't matter whether
you use the concepts behind faster-than-light travel to enable your
setting to be that of a space empire in conflict with its neighbour,
or you use the multi-universe or multi-dimensional concepts to enable
your character to travel in time, with all the interesting
philosophical paradoxes that that entails. Your readers are assumed
to understand or simply to accept these concepts as part of the
language of science fiction, so much so that many writers now use
these concepts like buzz-words without really going into detail on
the theory.
