skills/novel-story-telling/references/science-fiction.md

# Science Fiction Story Design

## Contents

1. Speculative premise contract
2. Consequence cascade
3. Useful structures
4. Escalation and resolution
5. Continuity ledgers
6. Exposition control
7. Failure modes
8. Research basis

## Speculative Premise Contract

Begin with one principal deviation from a recognizable baseline. Define it before expanding the setting:

```yaml
novum:
baseline:
scientific_status: known | plausible_extrapolation | invented_rule
capabilities: []
limitations: []
costs: []
failure_modes: []
controllers: []
beneficiaries: []
harmed_groups: []
reader_must_understand_before_payoff: []
deliberately_unknown: []
```

The speculative system must change character decisions, institutions, or survival conditions. Decorative terminology does not fulfill the genre promise.

## Consequence Cascade

1. State the deviation in one sentence.
2. Record its direct affordance and direct cost.
3. Trace second-order effects through labor, wealth, law, war, family, identity, ecology, belief, and daily manners.
4. Select consequences that pressure the protagonist's goal, wound, relationship, or moral boundary.
5. Convert one benefit into an externality.
6. Convert one limitation into a plot opportunity.
7. Expand combinations and consequences of established rules before inventing additional systems.

Every major world detail should answer at least one question:

- Who gains agency?
- Who loses bargaining power?
- What behavior becomes ordinary?
- What new crime, duty, taboo, market, or identity appears?
- What existing institution adapts badly?
- What does the protagonist personally owe because this system exists?

## Useful Structures

### Extrapolation cascade

Familiar baseline → disruptive novum → personal opportunity → institutional adoption → hidden externality → systemic crisis → choice between private benefit and repair → new equilibrium.

### Discovery to wonder

Anomaly → plausible wrong model → test → partial confirmation → contradictory evidence → larger model → ethical or ontological implication → awe payoff joined to a character decision.

### Engineering siege

Define a closed environment, finite resources, and deadline. Let the first fix fail through incomplete knowledge. Make each repair consume another resource or close another option. Entangle technical authority with trust and sacrifice. Resolve by combining established constraints.

### First contact or translation

Pattern detection → agency misclassification → partial protocol → incompatible assumptions → factional exploitation → costly communicative act → negotiated uncertainty, separation, coexistence, or tragic non-equivalence.

### Institutional transformation

Personal-scale innovation → professional adoption → regulatory capture, inequality, or weaponization → protagonist benefits from the opposed system → local resolution with continuing systemic cost.

## Escalation Devices

- **Constraint:** reduce time, energy, bandwidth, habitat, redundancy, or viable options.
- **Scale:** personal → crew → community → institution → civilization or ecology.
- **Knowledge:** anomaly → model → model failure → truth that changes the objective.
- **Control:** tool → dependency → monopoly → autonomous or emergent behavior.
- **Externality:** convenience for one group imposes hidden cost on another.
- **Irreversibility:** experiment → deployment → lock-in → point of no return.
- **Moral cost:** survival requires betrayal, exploitation, erasure, or identity change.
- **Rule collision:** two established systems create an unforeseen but derivable crisis.
- **Adversarial learning:** an opponent adapts to the last solution.
- **Success complication:** a working fix creates an additional burden.

Do not escalate only through larger explosions or new inventions.

## Resolution Devices

- **Constraint exploit:** use a demonstrated limitation as the solution's leverage.
- **Rule combination:** combine two mechanisms already shown.
- **System redesign:** change incentives, access, or governance rather than destroy the technology.
- **Sacrificial containment:** preserve others at a personal, informational, or ecological price.
- **Negotiated equilibrium:** rivals accept an unstable but intelligible balance.
- **Paradigm correction:** a more accurate model makes a previously impossible act possible.
- **Local victory with systemic remainder:** close the protagonist's arc while preserving credible long-term consequences.

Verify every resolution for planted rule, demonstrated cost, protagonist agency, thematic consequence, and post-resolution world state.

## Continuity Ledgers

### World rule

```yaml
rule_id:
statement:
scope:
preconditions: []
observable_effect:
cost:
hard_limits: []
known_exceptions: []
false_beliefs: []
introduced_in:
demonstrated_in: []
used_for_resolution_in:
```

Track system versions, resource quantities, failure propagation, access rights, communication delays, institutional incentives, scientific uncertainty, and which characters understand which model.

Before a climax, audit whether every decisive capability has reader-facing evidence. A mechanism may remain unexplained, but its observable behavior must stay consistent.

## Exposition Control

Explain mechanics when viewpoint, action, or decision makes them relevant. Prefer:

- failed procedure exposing a rule;
- disagreement between experts with different incentives;
- maintenance, training, regulation, trade, or ritual revealing ordinary use;
- sensory consequences before terminology;
- a character's wrong prediction corrected by observable effect.

Avoid answering questions no viewpoint character needs in the current scene. Split dense information across demonstrations, decisions, and consequences.

## Failure Modes

- Technology functions as decorative vocabulary.
- A capability scales conveniently only in the climax.
- Experts behave irrationally solely to protect a reveal.
- Exceptions appear after hard limits are established.
- Society remains unchanged despite transformative technology.
- Exposition interrupts action without altering a choice.
- Each complication adds a new device instead of deepening existing rules.
- The climax solves physics but not character or ethics.
- Scientific authority substitutes for observable behavior.
- A changed causal rule leaves downstream society and events untouched.

## Research Basis

- Suyi Davies Okungbowa, SFWA, [From the Inside Out: Worldbuilding Through Extrapolation](https://sfwa.org/2019/05/03/from-the-inside-out-worldbuilding-through-extrapolation/).
- SFWA, [The Art of Story as Worldbuilding](https://sfwa.org/2019/10/16/the-art-of-story-as-worldbuilding/).
- SFWA, [A Checklist for Critiquing Science Fiction](https://sfwa.org/2009/06/18/a-checklist-for-critiquing-science-fiction/).
- Brandon Sanderson, [What Are Sanderson's Laws of Magic?](https://faq.brandonsanderson.com/knowledge-base/what-are-sandersons-laws-of-magic/).

Applying limitation-centered fictional-system guidance to technology is a deliberate synthesis, not a scientific claim.