Grounding the Otherworldly: Science-Fiction That Plays by the Rules of Realism

What if I wrote a sci-fi novel that doesn’t break the rules of realism?

The idea strikes me during my morning coffee. It’s late 2009. I live in Poznań, Poland. My room is overlooking the neighbourhood of Chwaliszewo (once a separate town, now part of the city centre). An exceptionally harsh and long winter is about to start.

What will later become VOSTOK, a genre-bending literary sci-fi, is but a few sketches and incongruent ideas. A cyborg woman who modifies her body as a form of art. Her brother or maybe childhood friend with no distinct characteristics. Their cheesy origin story involving — I kid you not — a fire in an orphanage. A multi-lever cyberpunkesque city. It’s getting nowhere, so I’m happy to scrap it and start anew.

If you made, right along one of its walls, a longitudinal section through the pub Kisielice, on the left side of the colourful rectangle you would see a bar, the back of a bartender working behind the bar, in the background a wall painted in vividly coloured stripes, black-and-white artwork on the wall, and further towards the right end of the section: empty tables, chairs, sofas. The only clients in the pub visible from this perspective were a man and a woman, in their late twenties by the looks of it, who sat on a soft couch by the right edge of the rectangular section and talked, smoking tremendous amounts of cigarettes.

VOSTOK by Łukasz Drobnik

Weronika and Wu, the main characters, are no longer siblings or childhood friends with a tragic backstory. Neither of them has brain implants or bionic limbs. They are twentysomethings who hate their jobs as a barmaid and a technical writer, navigate toxic relationships and exhibit unhealthy coping mechanisms, such as drinking their problems away in a bunch of Poznań’s pubs. When Weronika met Wu, she didn’t realise straight away he was gay — and now she’s in love with her best friend. A realistic story with a realistic premise. Now let’s make it sci-fi on top of that.

Adding the otherworldly to the ordinary

How do you write a book that’s speculative at heart but realistic on the surface? You need to start with some decisions.

I wanted the realistic layer to be literary and rather poetic in style, told by an all-seeing — but not all-knowing — narrator. One of my inspirations was the narrator in von Trier’s Dogville and the book ended up dotted with scenes written from a god-like perspective, with the narrator hanging hundreds of metres above the city.

Clouds shrouded the sky making it monochromatically grey, all at once darkening the streets. If you observed the city from above the rooftops, you would see people coming back from work, cars passing by, a tight network of tram overhead wires. You had the impression that if you snapped a single wire and started to pull, Poznań would fray, exposing its concrete innards.

VOSTOK by Łukasz Drobnik

Crime gels well with virtually any genre, so I made VOSTOK a mystery, one in which the murder weapon is a 19th-century war scythe. So far so good. Now the hard part starts.

The heart of the story

The omnipresent but not omniscient point of view made it easier to pace the reveal of speculative elements without it feeling contrived. The problem was, with no insight into the characters’ inner worlds it was difficult to connect with them. The initial drafts lacked heart — things were happening but didn’t resonate on an emotional level.

I worked hard on dialogue and descriptions of the characters’ behaviour, but it wasn’t enough. The original premise of writing a realistic novel that’s speculative only in dialogue failed to contain the story I wanted to tell. So I thought, let’s break some rules. I added passages told in the first person by different characters.

Suddenly, it’s the first weeks of our friendship. It’s early summer, and we go together to the Warta River, to the sun-burnt grasses, to be devoured by mosquitoes. We sit down on the concrete riverbank, still warm from the scorching day, look at the river’s waters, listen to the hum of cars on Chrobry Bridge, drink krupnik straight from the bottle, talk.

It turns out Wu and I read exactly the same books, go to the same films, have uncannily similar reflections on the emptiness and pointlessness of life. Something about Venus, about Ceres, it’s getting colder. Wu wraps his arm around me, goose pimples all over my body. My breathing gets faster, and I feel an urge to take him home, for eternal exclusivity, and make love to him all night until dawn. It’s because I don’t know yet that in a week’s time he’ll introduce me to his boyfriend.

VOSTOK by Łukasz Drobnik

…and the brains

Exposition is a crucial part of most speculative fiction. If you create a new world with a set of its own rules, you usually want the reader to see that world, learn those rules.

VOSTOK is an experiment attempting to answer the question,

Can you write a sci-fi novel with minimum exposition, and if so, how much exposition do you need to make it work?

It took me years to strike a balance. The initial drafts portioned out exposition only through dialogue. As a result, the speculative layer of the novel was painted with just a few brush strokes, and the painting was too abstract to have much resonance.

Then I added some environmental storytelling: the sci-fi part of the story was now also told through ads, leaflets, TV, and radio. The effect was better, but it wasn’t quite it.

I started layering the novel with different texts: snippets of newspaper articles, encyclopaedic entries, fragments of instruction manuals. Only then did the sci-fi portion of the novel become defined enough to make a meaningful whole with the realistic part.

It is what it is

In the end, is VOSTOK a sci-fi novel that doesn’t break the rules of realism? Though the answer is far from a resounding ‘yes’, I can’t say I’m bothered.

As an atheist with Catholic upbringing, I both have irrational reverence for dogmas and find perverse pleasure in tearing them down. Maybe there’s a method to this madness: start with a set of rules that give you an initial structure but bend them to your needs to tell the best story you can.

The result is VOSTOK: not quite realistic fiction, not quite sci-fi, but hopefully something more than the sum of the two.