When writing science-fiction, you have to put yourself into an unknown world. You're going someplace you've never been. While writing TIME WILL TELL, I don't know if I consciously thought about that, but I'm sure I did it.
The only ways I see to research outer-space is through reading what others who have been there described about it or trying to visualize it in imagination. It's sort of like heaven or hell–nobody's come back from either place to tell about them but we have ideas, right or wrong, from what has been written about them.
I think in imagining anything, we draw on what we know and embellish that. I used the familiar to equate to the unfamiliar. For example, when I was describing the inside of a space ship, I thought about an airplane cockpit and it's instrument panel. I'd been lucky enough to see one up close on a return trip from Europe. For the inside of the ship, I used, of all things, a double-wide trailer.
As for the aliens, I had reason not to make them too different from earthlings, so I simply gave them a couple of distinctive physical features.
Describing the protagonist was not difficult. She was human. Since I'd been a reporter, talking about her job was easy.
I've written in other genres and I know that an author has an additional step to take when writing science-fiction. He or she has to go into the unknown and let imagination flow. Ah, but there's a flip side to this: Readers don't know what the unknown is either.
Thanks for reading my blogs; I appreciate your comments.
Mary S. Palmer
Webpage: maryspalmer.com; e-mail-mlsp1@bellsouth.net
TIME WILL TELL, $4.99, is available at Musa Publishing, Amazon.com. and Barnes & Noble.
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