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out an elaborate chesslike game, discovering and using innate magical abilities like shape-changing. Never mind that by the third volume you learn that these people are all descended from colonists who came to this planet from Earth. Don’t be distracted by the conclusion, which explains in perfectly natural terms where all their seemingly magical powers come from. The story begins with a fantasy feel, so that Tepper has to unfold the laws of the universe very early in the first volume, the way a fantasy writer must.
    On the other hand, David Zindell’s brilliant science fiction novel Neverness ends up with almost as many gods and mythical, magical events as the Iliad and Odyssey combined. Yet because it begins with a science fiction feel, the reader assumes from the start that the laws of the known universe apply with exceptions. The book is correctly marketed as science fiction, and that’s how it’s received.

    These are the boundaries of speculative fiction, and within that country, the boundary between science fiction and fantasy. There are high walls here and there, and high-voltage fences, and moats with alligators-but there’s always a way over or under or around the obstacle. You must be aware of the boundaries; you must tread carefully whenever you get near one; but you are not their prisoner.
    Indeed, you might think of the genre boundaries not as obstacles, but rather as dikes and levees that hold out the river or the sea. Wherever they are raised up, they allow you to cultivate new land; and when you need a new space to plant your story, just put up a new dike where you want it
    to be. If enough of us like your story, we’ll accept your new boundary as the true one, and plant a few stories of our own in your new-found land. It’s the best gift we can give each other. We’re all of us harvesting crops in lands opened up by the pioneers in our field-Wells, Verne, Merritt, Haggard, Lovecraft, Shelley, Tolken, and many others. But we’re none of us confined to the territory they discovered. It’s just the starting point.
    How can we create the literature of the strange if we stay in well-mapped lands?

2. World Creation

    Stories start working on you in a thousand different ways. I’m going to give you some personal examples, so you can see something of the process one writer goes through. The point is not that you should do it my way, but rather that there is no right way to come up with a story concept.
1. Where Ideas Come From

    I was sixteen, and my older brother’s girlfriend (now his wife) had urged me to read Isaac Asimov”s Foundation trilogy (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation). It had been years since I last read science fiction regularly, but these books so enthralled me that I wanted not only to read more science fiction, but also to try writing it. At the time I supposed that to write a science fiction story you had to come up with a futuristic idea. My older brother, Bill, was in the army, having just returned from a tour of duty in Korea, and so military thoughts were on my mind.
    One day as my father was driving me to school through the bottomlands of the Provo River in Utah, I began trying to imagine what kind of wargames would be developed to train soldiers for combat in space. It would be useless to have land-based training games, since that wouldn’t prepare you for three-dimensional fighting in the null-gravity environment of space. Even training in airplanes would be pointless, since there is still a definite horizontal orientation to flying in an atmosphere- straight up and straight down are very different from straight across!
    So the only place where soldiers could train to think and move easily and naturally in space combat would be outside the gravity well of any planet. It couldn’t be in open space-you’d lose too many trainees that way, drifting off in the midst of the game. So there had to be a huge
    Enclosed in a null-G environment, with variable