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Writing science fiction can be based on the inspirational reception of the real thing:

• How's the brain mapping doing?
• What kind of edges is CRISPR/cas9 busy cutting?
• All fine and fast at the particle accelerator?
• Hey, gravitational waves sound like a promising plot core.
• Not to mention my favorite multipurpose vehicles, dark matter and energy.

Most scientists do science fiction writers¹ two big favors: They publish hard, because they have to. And they strive hard to deliver abstracts accessible to people with no real clue about their line of research, a.k.a niche. Because scientific journal gatekeepers tend to be nothing but a more literate and better informed sub-segment of this overwhelming majority of humankind. Thanks to this lucky combination of hardships, inspiration is but one click away.

Most science fiction writers don't care. They prefer to walk well trodden paths:

• Beaming around far more substantial stuff than quantum states is considered standard practice.
• Artificial gravity and time travel have undergone commoditization.
• Don't get me started on the established ways of moving one specific kind of notoriously short-lived, non-extremophile and partly sapient primate across interstellar distances.

Be it hard or soft, innovative or traditional, most science fiction breaks the bounds of current technological feasibility. That's the genre core. The first level.

On the second level, the corresponding sciences would be sociology, psychology and economics, most science fiction declares the straight OECD based Caucasian male hero daydream of Hollywood lore a permanent fixture, as immutable as the basic laws of physics are flexible.

Five, fifty, five hundred or five thousand years from now, some straight middle-class WASP going by the name of Steve/John/Michael from original/Neo/Nova New York will save his home planet/space station/galaxy from whichever self-inflicted or alien induced harm. In the course of which he gets more or less intensely and explicitly laid with some Jane/Sarah/Gloria he met on the way. She can nowadays be black and/or emancipated enough to take over some of the beating/fencing/shooting. There might be an odd non-white or non-straight team member. But that's about it, maximum modernization mode.

No problem. Science fiction is entertainment. Not aspiring to be the edu or info kind of tainment. Steve and Jane, John and Sarah, Michael and Gloria, talking audience now, have every right to have fun. As author of an early trilogy mostly conforming to convention, I'm fine with it.

But. Because there's always a 'but', there has to be some 'but', with science.

What if more science fiction writers broke with tradition? Out with New York, Atlanta, London and Berlin. The future belongs to the young, and a lot of them live in Lagos, Agadir, Rio and Shenzhen. New globally relevant locations and the corresponding cast, a second fiction level on top of the usual technological breakthroughs. Sounds easy? Won't change much? Sure?

From a practitioner perspective, double level science fiction raises inspiring questions:[/size]

• No one is going to blink at my Virtual Reality stuff. The brain-machine interfaces are pretty futuristic, but who cares? Basing the corresponding IT major in near future Nigeria, that's the part that won't go down easy and will need explaining.
• Gay marriage, unisex toilets and transgender pronoun preferences, banalities in Silicon Valley. The corresponding cast and scenes will evolve differently in an imminent future Lagos. And that's just the pointy upper end of a big iceberg of traditions, religions and conventions.
• If my heroes are called Abeo, Infunanya and Mobo, do I introduce connotations that some people will associate, rightly or wrongly, with these names? If my hero is called Wang Xiu Ying, do I need to explain about Asian first and second name conventions, or can the audience be assumed willing to achieve learning by reading?
• With a team of five black guys, none of them can be 'the black guy'. Do I still need to mention the race bit, for all of them, to make sure no reader defaults to Caucasian? Sometimes wish I was doing movies... Will a scene involving surprise about the presence of a white person work standalone, or does it require a narrator giving readers a couple of hints?

Writing double level science fiction is great fun, otherwise I wouldn't keep doing it. I very much encourage all science fiction writers, whichever their personal background, to give it a try.  Just brace yourself for one effect: What we don't usually touch, when we imagine all kinds of technologically advanced futures, tells us a lot about what is wrong in our present. Presents.

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1. The author, proudly delusional, insists on being considered a writer. Of science fiction, imminent to near future, on the hard side of soft and uystopian, including race and gender relations. For details please check out troim-kryzl.biz for #AltLeftSci

As someone who both wears proverbial hats as a writer and a game designer (in a decidedly amateur context in both cases), the question of how stories can be presented in different formats is one that's often interested me. In games, the tools we use to create and give personality to our characters are quite varied – but also may differ in form from those used by a writer or storyteller.

I do, nonetheless, think of myself in the role of storyteller when writing adventure games – or perhaps somewhere between storyteller and dungeon master, writing the story and world as the player moves through it. This, however, I suspect means that I sometimes use techniques from storytelling when others might work better. The game designer's ability to use sound, an array of writing options, and graphical presentation to get a character's personality over is a wide toolbox.

To take a recent example, I've been working and re-working my little Doctor Who adventure game, LIFE, over the course of this year. It's an essentially complete game, I'm just trying to tinker and polish until maybe possibly hopefully it becomes a game some people feel it's worthwhile spending the time to play. One of the major difficulties I'm finding with this is that I'm struggling – despite my theoretically larger toolset – with how to bring out the personas of the different aliens and characters the player meets.

LIFE has a predominant text based element (plus its graphics), something I feel plays fairly well to my comfort zone of writing. My tendency has been to use that as a conversation between narrator and player; the text parser feedback gives the player commentary on the effects of their actions, as well as simply reporting them, and it is certainly not above making amusingly sarcastic comments if the player's actions merit them. I think this is definitely a feature of the game, but I'm wondering if I've pushed it too far when it comes to characters.

The player character is quite a blank slate, operating as a detached lone wolf rebel (but a rather less glamorous and fighty one than that term probably implies), and LIFE doesn't have many "advanced" character relationships involved in it. As such, I've generally stuck to reporting conversations the way I've reported other actions e.g. "You ask Adrish about minerals, and he tells you that he will buy PUMICE for a billion mazumas" or whatever. This also has the advantage of making it very easy to intersperse observation into speech, which can help with giving hints to the player. What I'm trying to work out is whether these advantages are worth the less direct nature of reported speech, which I think may risk cutting the players off too much from the characters with whom they interact.

It's worth here also addressing some of the other methods that a designer can use to bring characters across. Thanks to LIFE's rather cranky system, there's not a lot I can do on the graphical end: it's hard to make pixel characters super visually expressive unless you're a master animator. Different text effects may be do-able, but I'm not sure I have the range available to really get individual personalities working that way, and it's worth remembering that effects that mess with text presentation can adversely affect the accessibility of the game for some users. Sound is more possible, though the primary difficulty there is that committing to a voice acting approach requires a sizeable cast to be available (and in turn restricts the scope of the game based on that). Given LIFE's text-based nature I wouldn't want to rely on it too heavily, either – though I do think that actual voices can work extremely well in adventure games and I'd quite like to see more properly voice-acted games  (in e.g. Yorkshire Gubbins the voices are a massive part of the atmosphere).

And so we come back to the key question of how much the game should provide a storyteller/narrator, and how much that actually interferes with the interaction between the player and their character/the game world. Whilst most games try and reduce or even destroy the position of the game as an external narrator, we should be aware of this possibility as designers, and its optimal role - especially in adventure games - is well worth considering.
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I have always been frustrated by traditional portrayals of magic. Why, exactly, should waving a stick and shouting a few words in Latin produce a defined, predictable effect? If there's some power flowing through the world, and I'm able to use it, why can't I produce any effect I like? This seemed like a good basis for my first roleplaying game.

The design brief was simple: a game in which players were limited, not by the rules, but by their own imaginations. A player might, logically, attempt to play like this:

"I see the game. I call down a storm of fire to kill all the baddies. I win the game."

This, clearly, was going to be a problem. But how could I prevent it and preserve the player's creativity?

Fast forward several months to me sitting on a bus in a town called Puerto Octay. "Puerto Octay": I liked the sound of that. To me it seemed like the phrase "The Power of Eight" in some archaic language. Eight whats? How about eight magical Glyphs, which are combined by wizards to produce spells. I had found the missing ingredient for my game.

Each glyph would represent a Law of Physics, based on those of our own universe (I talk more about my love of rules here), and by breaking those Laws, spells could be cast. The eighth glyph was easily identified: the existence of glyphs and spells is a Law in itself. For the other seven glyphs, I would need to boil down the Laws of our own universe into seven principles, and give each a name. Here's what I came up with:

Epi – Heat (also cold, energy...)

Konot – Light (also darkness, transparency...)

Mazarule – Solidity (also vapour, mass...)

Listay – Attraction (also repulsion, vibration...)

Akri – Motion (also stillness, time...)

Salifray – Growth (also decay, life...)

Kos – Dominance (also subservience, hierarchy...)

Enta – The Master Glyph. This governs the formation of spells and is the only glyph not based on the Laws of our universe.

Using the right combination of glyphs, it should be possible for a player to cast any spell they can think of. Creating a zombie, for example, would require a combination of Salifray (growth) and Kos (dominance). Gameplay would be puzzle-based: as well as coming up with creative solutions to problems, players would have to identify and thwart spells used against them.

When creating a character (or "Wielder"), players would have a basic understanding of two glyphs of their choice. Further proficiency in those glyphs could be gained through study and adventure. Later on, players could diversify or specialise in just one glyph, and both options would need to be viable. Proficiency in Enta (the Master Glyph) would improve as the player's skill increased, and so act as a "levelling" system. This, combined with the game's rules and the game master's judgment, would determine the size and complexity of spells which could be attempted. Clearly this needed to be quantified, but I was too terrified to make the attempt.

I turned, instead, to the setting for my world. It would need to be simple, and leave lots of room for game masters to add their own content. I settled on a world of concentric circles, with a Metropolis in the middle and ever more mysterious lands and oceans surrounding it. Fantastical creatures could be accommodated if desired: they'd simply have some connection to one of the glyphs.

My world's history was more problematic. I was tempted to give each glyph a long, detailed history but, again, I felt simplicity was key. I decided that glyph magic would be a recent discovery, causing a revolution in my world comparable to that of the internet in ours. I used this analogy to create a society in which the old establishment is threatened by cells of self-taught, criminal upstarts, and this in turn gave rise to the three backgrounds players could choose for their wielder:

> Academic – holding formal training in glyph magic (in our world, those with IT qualifications).

> Freelancer – self-taught, seeking new knowledge wherever they can find it (hackers).

> Smith/tradesman – uses the new magic to enhance their business (IT department in an existing industry).

And so to the moment of truth: the first playtest! Armed with a handful of shaky rules I took my willing victim, John, on a money-making adventure in the Metropolis. He cast a spell on a street juggler's baton, causing it to fall, and, in the confusion, stole a hat full of coins. He then managed to frame another man (whom he subdued by sticking his boots to the floor) for the crime, and convinced the Kos (dominance) wielding police officers that he was licensed to Wield.

We both enjoyed the adventure and John identified where the game needed to improve. The big problem is a lack of a resolution mechanism: at present when a spell is cast, I, as the game master, simply decide the outcome. This needs to change, but the only system I'm familiar with is the one used in Dungeons and Dragons: a die is rolled and has to exceed a certain value for the spell to succeed. Perhaps the quantity and size (number of faces) of the dice could vary depending on the number of glyphs the spell contains?

To close, let's look again at my player who wanted to win the game with a storm of fire. They are clearly not playing in the "spirit" of the game, and will not enjoy themselves. A spirit is not an easy thing to define, but if players are on board with it they are less likely to try to break the game. Perhaps my rules don't have to be perfect after all.

Thank you for reading about my young project. Can you think of any resolution mechanisms in existing roleplaying games, including your own, which might be applicable? I need ideas to help me out here. On the other hand, if you've seen something in this article you would like to use in your own project or roleplaying game, please do so. This is all highly experimental, and the results may be quite interesting. [/size]

Beowulf has the dubious honour of being (to my knowledge) the only Old English poem to get itself three film adaptations – one of which contains Angelina Jolie spattered with strategic gold paint – and one for TV.

All of these, based on a quick Wikipedia check by yours truly, stray pretty far from the source material. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it might be odd in light of what I want to talk about: the fact that Beowulf itself, the poem, is very like a film already. 

As a disclaimer: I know nothing about films, other than having watched a lot of them, and have never watched any of the film adaptations of Beowulf. All quotes are taken from Jack's student edition of Beowulf: the translations are my own.[/size]

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Beowulf doesn't start with Beowulf himself: it starts with Scyld Scefing, a character from the distant past who never appears again, the founder of the Danish dynasty. The poem sketches out the deeds of some of the Danes' most glorious kings, culminating in the building of the magnificent hall Heorot by Hrothgar. We're shown Scyld's funeral: his body is sent out to sea in a royal ship, and we're told this is also how he arrived in Denmark as a boy, laden with treasures and entirely alone.

The scene is set – this story is about heroism, and here is how the Danes demonstrated it, and here is how it led to the building of Heorot, glorious and ill-fated.

Quote

Hwæt, wē Gār-Dena in geārdagum,
þēodcyninga þrym gefrūnon,
hū ðā æþelingas ellen fremedon.

Lo, we have heard of the glory of the kings
of the Spear-Danes in former days,
how the princes performed courage.

But there's a foreboding note in the fact that the poem begins with a funeral. An oddly symmetrical funeral, at that: from the sea Scyld came and to the sea he returns. In other words, we've been shown what glory looks like, but we've also been shown how it must eventually fall, how it blooms and withers in cycles.

I bring this up because during one seminar, I daydreamed about how I'd start a Beowulf film if I were writing and directing it, only to realise the poem had done all the work for me. Everything I've just described fits together beautifully into opening credits. Picture it: the crashing sea, the gold-laden ship, the king's body... and a ghostly ship making its way over the waves, bearing a young boy to shore. The story's background is sketched out for us, and the mood is set, as surely as if it came with a soundtrack.

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Even when Beowulf himself appears in the poem, we don't learn his name immediately: he is simply Higelāces þegn, Hygelac's liegeman. We see him set out on his journey to Denmark and explain his purpose to the Danish coastguard without ever revealing who he is. It's not until he reaches Hrothgar's court that he says Bēowulf is mīn nama, to Hrothgar's herald. The herald then goes to tell Hrothgar who is at his gates, and Hrothgar immediately places Beowulf as the son of an old friend. God must have sent Beowulf to them, he says, because hē þrītiges/ manna mægencræft on his mundgripe/ heaþorōf hæbbe ('he, brave in battle, has the strength of thirty men in his hand-grip'). Incidentally, in Grendel's first attack on Heorot, he slew thirty men...

This is very neat storytelling: the details are filled in for us as we go, and they're slotted in exactly as they should be, as Beowulf progresses from coast to court and must observe the courtesies. His place in the story is explained by Hrothgar, the man best placed to know who he is – including his family – and how he fits into the situation. (By the by, knowing his family is important: the exile in The Wanderer laments that he cannot find anyone who knows of his own kindred, and the story here is establishing that Beowulf, far from being an exile, is a hero and an honoured guest.)

But it's also very film-like! It's making us experience the narrative rather than following it. Compare it with a fairy tale, or with the Four Branches (for those who saw my last article), which begin with formulae like 'Pwyll was lord of Dyfed'. Revealing the situation through dialogue is a staple of films that centre on personal drama.

This isn't the only time we see this: when Grendel's mother comes to take vengeance, we don't find out anything about the thegn she kills until Hrothgar laments his death to Beowulf, calling him Æschere... mīn rūnwita ond mīn rǣdbora ('my confidant and advisor'). Again, we get the exposition in the most fitting place in the narrative and in the mouth of the one best placed to know.

Much later in the poem, we find out that Beowulf's lord, Hygelac, was the last of three brothers, and the other two were killed – one by the other. We discover this through Beowulf's monologue as he – now king of the Geats – thinks about the situations in which it is impossible to avenge loved ones, after his final foe, a dragon, has burned his hall to the ground. Him was geōmor sefa,/ wǣfre ond wælfūs ('His heart was sad, restless and death-ready')... This comes in the second half of the poem, in which we start to see the darker history of the Geats and of how Beowulf became king, his kinsmen fallen in war. Speech (albeit monologue rather than dialogue) sets out the background for us, right when it's most emotionally resonant.

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The Beowulf-poet seems to have been fond of revealing past events much later in the story, because they pull this trick a lot. Sometimes they do it in narration, as they do with Hygelac's death in battle, which we don't hear the details of until after we know Beowulf is king. Much  more often, though, they do it through dialogue or a song within the story. We learn the origins of the Swedish-Geatish wars (which now threaten to overwhelm the Geats) after Beowulf's death, as a messenger foretells doom to his people; we hear about the feud of Finnsburh, in which the Danish princess Hildeburh loses husband, son and brother, through a song Hrothgar's scop sings to entertain men at a celebratory feast.

Many of these flashbacks are there to evoke atmosphere, fill in important story details, or act as omens for the future, and might work better on paper than on screen. But some work exactly the way a film flashback ought to. When Beowulf arrives at Hrothgar's court, he's challenged by another warrior, Unferth, who attempts to embarrass him by telling everyone about the time Beowulf, young and foolhardy, lost a swimming match. Beowulf matches wits with Unferth and gives his own side of the story. In his version, he and his friend Breca rowed out together but were struck by a storm. Breca eventually managed to swim to shore, while Beowulf was attacked by water-monsters and fought them off with his sword. Beowulf is proving that he can take on a dangerous task and survive, even when storms try to throw him off course – but he's also providing an important parallel for his fight with Grendel's mother, who drags him to the bottom of her mere as he tries to fend off attacks by water-monsters, and who is eventually killed by a sword. In fact, the poem calls her a brimwylf ('sea-she-wolf') and merewīf mihtig ('mighty sea-woman'). So being good underwater is pretty essential...

Beowulf's description of his sea adventure is very visual:

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Đā wit ætsomne on sǣ wǣron
fīf nihta fyrst oþþæt unc flōd tōdrāf,
wado weallende, wedera cealdost,
nipende niht, ond norþanwind
heaðogrim ondhwearf; hrēo wǣron ȳþa.

Then we two were together on the sea
for the space of five nights until a flood drove us apart,
surging waters, coldest of weather,
night growing dark, and the north wind,
battle-fierce, turned against us; the waves were fierce.

As you read his account you can almost see him, struggling against the waves, gasping for breath in the icy wind, fending off sea-monsters right and left.  In a film, this would be a perfect moment for Beowulf's dialogue to turn into overhead narration, as we saw his younger self tossed by the waves, contending with the storm – a promise of what was to come in his fight against a merewīf mihtig.

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I owe this particular point to Alain Renoir, who first made it in 1962. Renoir suggested that the oral poet who speaks their poetry aloud must make their audience visualise the action at a rapid pace: that is to say, their words must do the same work that the images of a film do. They must make what is happening appear to their audience, as if real. For this to happen they must take advantage of all the tricks that a camera has – different angles, panning, different types of shot.

The best example of this is Grendel's final journey to Heorot and his fight with Beowulf there:

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Cōm on wanre niht
scrīdan sceadugenga. Scēotend swǣfon,
þā þæt hornreced healdan scoldon,
ealle būton ānum...

ac hē wæccende wrāþum on andan
bād bolgenmōd beadwa geþinges.

The shadow-goer came gliding
in dark night. Warriors slept,
those who had to hold that gabled hall,
all except one...

but he, watching, awaited enraged,
in hostile anger, for the outcome of the fighting.

Renoir analysed these lines as first a 'long exterior shot', dimly showing a danger approaching Heorot; then a 'medium interior shot' panning across the sleeping warriors within, his prey; and finally a close-up on Beowulf, the only man capable of saving them. Once it's pointed out, it's very easy to imagine.

Grendel himself is described in various terms as he comes closer and closer to the hall. We never truly find out what Grendel is through the whole course of the poem, though we know he is related to ogres, trolls and elves. He's capable of thought and perhaps even of loneliness – he is drawn to Heorot initially because he is, in Tolkien's words, 'maddened by the sound of harps', joys he can never share in. This makes it easy for the poet to have him verbally shape-shift. Initially he is a sceadugenga who comes scrīþan, the same verb used for the movement of clouds, as if he himself is darkness and mist descending on Heorot. Then he is a manscaða, a ravager; finally he is a rinc, a warrior. This deliberate ambiguity would be a problem for an action film, but for a horror film, clever camera angles could arrange that we never quite see enough of Grendel to know what he is – making the terror he inspires all the more effective. 

And the camera work doesn't stop as we enter the fight: all the description is short phrases, two half-lines at most, and they focus hugely on body parts. Take for instance the moment when Beowulf rips Grendel's arm off:

Quote

Līcsār gebād
atol ǣglǣca; him on eaxle wearð
syndolh sweatol, seonowe onsprungon,
burston banlocan.

The terrible fierce one
suffered body-pain; on his arm
a mortal wound became visible, sinews sprang apart,
muscles burst.

This is a fairly common technique in Old English poetry for descriptions of battles – you'll find it in The Battle of Maldon, for a start – but in film terms, what we're seeing is rapid-fire close-up shots, keeping the action moving and punchy. (In fact, this scene isn't just punchy, it's jarring, and the focus on damage to the body is unusual for Old English battle scenes: it's meant to be monstrous. Interestingly, a similar technique is used to describe the funeral of Hildeburh's brother and son at Finnsburh, with heads melting and wounds bursting open – a sign that something is very wrong, and the feud isn't over yet.)

I could go on. This is a poem over 3000 lines long, and there's a lot of material to talk about – but I think at this point I'll leave you to it. Who knows, maybe this'll inspire someone to make a Beowulf film where Grendel's mother isn't unnecessarily sexualised! We live in hope.

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Further reading

Jack, G., ed., Beowulf: A Student Edition (Oxford, 1994)

O'Brien O'Keeffe, K., 'Beowulf, Lines 702b–836: Transformations and the Limits of the Human', Texas Studies in Literature and Language 23 (1981), 484–94

Renoir, A., 'Point of View and Design for Terror in Beowulf', Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 63 (1962), 154–67

Tolkien, J. R. R., 'Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics', Proceedings of the British Academy 22 (1936), 45 - 95