Sci-Fi Narration

Buckle up, this one’s gonna be out there.

Even for me.

Photo by Jonathan Velasquez on Unsplash

Sci-Fi Narration

One of the most crucial components of any Sci-Fi anything is the narrator. This might seem largely exclusive to books, and it probably is. But plenty of movies and games utilize narration as well. And, frankly, I think they’re better for it.

See, the thing with Sci-Fi is that we are inherently dealing with things that exist only in the creator’s mind. With almost any other genre, there’s a certain amount of reality that we can draw from. Even Fantasy is usually derived from something in the past; probably medieval England, though Celtic lore is becoming a popular side-street among publishers right now. But everything else has the modern world to work with.

But not Sci-Fi.

I suppose we can do near-future Sci-Fi to work with the modern world as our format. But even then, there are going to be assumptions about the trajectory of modern history that will need to be explained to us. Hence, the need for a narrator.

So, I’m going to share a completely unsolicited list of six types of narration we often see and outline the good and bad of each. Why? Because I feel like it. Also because I feel that those of us who like to create Sci-Fi, not just consume it, can benefit from understanding these things just a little more deeply. Knowledge is power or something like that.

First Person

Always a safe approach. Telling a hero’s story? Tell it from the Hero’s perspective.

This is great because it automatically gives us a good barometer for what’s important to describe. If it happens to or around the hero, then it’s a good thing to make sure the audience understands.

The risk here is that it can start feeling strange. After all, if any of this is just second nature to the hero, why would they be explaining it in detail as though to a child? I mean, Blasters are the standard within the Star Wars universe. So why would Han Solo ever feel the need to explain that lasers are what’s being shot? It’s not like I, when telling a story in modern times, say “Then the bank robber shot his bullet gun at me!” I would just say, “He shot at me!” It gets clunky.

The good news is that there are other principles that we can layer in, as I’ll talk about soon.

Omniscient Voice

It’s not the “opposite” of first person, per se, but it sort of is.

This is when you just have a neutral voice that knows everything and demonstrates that by describing everything from a detached outside perspective. This is really good because it sort of puts the telling of the story into the perspective of the reader. It will inherently know what needs to be explained and do so from the same observational lens that the reader or viewer or whatever is looking through.

The problem here is twofold. On the one hand you risk becoming a little too detached from the story. Sort of like a doctor just deadpan delivering a cancer diagnosis to a patient. It’s good because it lets the patient direct the emotions, but the risk is that they can sound completely uncaring and make the recipient feel removed from everything. Not great for a story since the point is to evoke emotion. The other issue is it can make it easy to start rambling. With first person we always have the perspective of the character and their experience to keep us tethered to the relevant story. Without that, we could really start going on tangents. That can be fine and purposeful, a la the AI from Dungeon Crawler Carl, but you better watch yourself, buster!

David Attenborough

I feel like this is the healthy medium between those first two voices. It works for most stories that aren’t explicitly using main character first person narration. Seriously, try it! In your head, the next time you’re reading a Sci-Fi book, imagine that David Attenborough is narrating it, like you’re watching a documentary. It’s so fun! It works exceptionally well for Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time series with the spiders and all that.

At any rate, I guess this is sort of omniscient. But also, not really. Because by imagining that you’re creating a script for a documentary both gives room to explain things as needed, but still tethers us to the relevant, you know? Like how Attenborough knows more about orangutangs than the orangutangs do, but not more than would be relevant to explaining an orangutang from a grounded perspective.

I don’t know.

Mostly I just wanted to encourage others to read books in a David Attenborough voice to themselves because when I started doing that it really enhanced the reading experience for me. There’s just something spectacular about the semi-aloof description approach being applied to a starship battle.

Present Tense

Okay, here’s that layering I was talking about for the different perspectives before. We can make first, second, third, fourth, fifth, whatever-person perspective be present tense. “I do,” or “He does,” vs. “I did,” or “He did,” and all that.

Yeah, you get it.

Present tense is a tricky one because it really makes it strange for describing the chain of events that lead to the modern setting. It’s like the extreme version of what I was saying before about how to get Mr. Spock to explain how the technology to beam someone up came about. Or, in third person, you get this weird effect of it feeling like a sports announcer is commentating on the story in real time.

The thing is, while those can be struggles, they can also be the exact things that really make a story come to life if done correctly. They work great for things like mysteries if the narrator, be they character or outside figure, is only understanding clues in time with the readers. Or you can make it comedic like the “Dear Readers” audio dub-over of the first Harry Potter movie where the narrator is shocked by things that you would expect them to have a preexisting understanding of.

Past Tense

Or you could go the opposite route and have the story be told from a looking-back perspective.

I think a lot of people default to this as it makes it easier to know what to say and when. If everything is looking back, you don’t have to worry about how far back. Whether you’re explaining a specific story beat or the history behind how the world got to where it is, it’s all just past tense. Easy peasy.

The pitfall here is you really risk things getting monotonous and confused. If you’re not careful about pointing out that you’re going pre-story explanation rather than story explanation, it can get confusing about what’s happening when.

I suppose you can do something like Memento where that’s the point and the whole timeline doesn’t become clear until the end when all the different components meet up in one central point. Hamilton does this in his Salvation ark, and it lands pretty well by the end. But you’d better be intentional about all that as you go!

Mix It All Together!

You know what?

Screw it!

Why choose?

Here’s the thing, all of these different narration approaches have their uses and if we mix and match, we can really start to have some fun with it. Maybe the primary story is told from the perspective of the main character but in past tense, as though they’re telling the story to an interviewer. But then we have interludes that are from a third person narrator that interjects to explain things that the main character glosses over. Or maybe the first-person-past-tense is the occasional interlude to offer backstory before slipping back into present tense, sort of like How I Met Your Mother.

Obviously, we have to be very careful here to make sure the various components stick with their various purposes. If you set the expectation that present tense is from Character A while past tense is Character B, then mixing the two is going to really confuse the story. So, tread carefully. But if you do it right it can give you a great, subtle way of organizing the information you give to your audience.

All of this advice, if you want to call it that, really can apply to just about anything. You can do the same for historical fiction or romance smut or whatever your fancy is. The reason I point it out for Sci-Fi in particular is that I think Sci-Fi has a unique propensity for being made or broken by narrative choices. Like I say, there is a lot of extra information that needs explanation when we’re inventing space worlds and imaginary technology.

Still, if you’re creating any sort of story, these are ideas to keep well in mind. There are tons of amazing stories out there that I think are let down by an unfocused approach to presenting them. It takes work, but I think we as creators are capable of more than what we sometimes imagine in ourselves. There’s no reason we can’t all create stories as pointed and intricate as Inception, we just need to be mindful about how we tell them. Because if we slack off, we muddle the plot and lose the beauty in the details.

So, go forth and write! Write movies or comics! But know who you are as the writer and narrator relative to your story and stick with it with clarity and purpose. Who knows, maybe you’ll be the next Orwell if you manage to keep that plotline straight and easy for your audience to digest since they can trust the perspective and consciously forget it, just lapping up the story with subconscious ease!