Sean Lawrence

STANLEY SCHMIDT. The first time I met Kelly Freas, the renowned science fiction artist, he had just published a series of posters to promote interest in and support for the space program. The entire series was displayed on walls throughout the house, and Kelly was asking all the guests at a party which posters they thought most effective. He found a fascinating pattern in the results. "Verbally oriented" people always picked the one showing a moon rocket, three ghostly sailing ships, and the phrase, "Suppose Isabella had said no..." "Visually oriented" people always picked the one with no words, just a picture of a rocket "hatching" from an Earthlike egg.  Writers, by the nature of their work, tend to be "verbally oriented." But they would do well to realize that many of their readers are less so. Most readers do not pick up a novel or short story to admire the author's cleverness in turning a phrase...

Dialog ISAAC ASIMOV Most stories deal with people, and one of the surefire activities of people is that of talking and of making conversation. It follows that in most stories there is dialog. Sometimes stories are largely dialog; my own stories almost always are. For that reason, when I think of the art of writing (which isn't often, I must admit) I tend to think of dialog.  In the Romantic period of literature in the first part of the nineteenth century, the style of dialog tended to be elaborate and adorned. Authors used their full vocabulary and had their characters speak ornately.  I remember when I was very young and first read Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby. How I loved the conversation. The funny passages were very funny to me, though I had trouble with John Browdie's thick Yorkshire accent (something his beloved Matilda, brought up under similar conditions, lacked, for some reason). What I loved even more, though, was the o...

ROBERT A. HEINLEIN Writing SF & Fan - 001 of 000 There are nine-and-sixty ways Of constructing tribal lays And every single one of them is right --RUDYARD KIPLING There are at least two principal ways to write speculative fiction--write about people, or write about gadgets. There are other ways; consider Stapledon's Last and First Men, recall S. Fowler Wright's The World Below. But the gadget story and the human-interest story comprise most of the field. Most science fiction stories are a mixture of the two types, but we will speak as if they were distinct--at which point I will chuck the gadget story aside, dust off my hands, and confine myself to the human-interest story, that being the sort of story I myself write. I have nothing against the gadget story--I read it and enjoy it--it's just not my pidgin. I am told that this is a how-to-do-it symposium; I'll stick to what I know how to do. The editor suggested that I ...

The Creation of Imaginary Worlds. The World Builder's Handbook and Pocket Companion. PAUL ANDERSON. This is an infinitely marvelous and beautiful universe which we are privileged to inhabit. Look inward to the molecules of life and the heart of the atom, or outward to moon, sun, planets, stars, the Orion Nebula where new suns and worlds are coming into being even as you watch, the Andromeda Nebula which is actually a whole sister galaxy: it is all the same cosmos, and every part of it is part of us. The elements of our flesh, blood, bones, and breath were forged out of hydrogen in stars long vanished. The gold in a wedding ring, the uranium burning behind many a triumphantly ordinary flick of an electric light switch, came out of those gigantic upheavals we call supernovas. It is thought that inertia itself, that most fundamental property of matter, would be meaningless--nonexistent--were there no stellar background to define space, time, and motion. Man is not ...