Believing in the story

 I’m reading a young adult fantasy story right now.  In it, the main character is a girl whose blood runs gold when she’s cut.  And when the villagers discover that, they repeatedly cut her to use the gold.

The girl is semi-immortal.  Labelled as a demon by the villagers, they behead her several times in an attempt to kill her permanently.  But they don’t succeed.  Each time she regenerates.

I suspect it’s ideas like this, and the superhuman strength which the fourteen year old girl wields, which has turned me away from reading fantasy in recent years.  The ideas seems to have got more and more outlandish.  I think that might be a side-effect of the author’s struggle to get published.  In an attempt to stand out from the crowd an author has to invent even crazier ideas - and often has to be willing to make their book dark and violent too.  That’s another reason why I haven’t read much YA recently.  To me, there seems to be more violence in some of these book than adult works.

This stretching of reality ever further has made it hard for me to suspend disbelief and to believe in these types of stories.  My practical brain gets in the way.  It’s too busy thinking ‘that’s impossible’ for me to get immersed in the story.  

I’m in danger of taking this over-practicality back into my own work too. In several early books I attempted to explain how the artificial intelligences which ran my starships happened to become sentient.  In one old book I even had a starship coder creating code for a sentient AI.  This was around 1980, well before computers were commonplace, the Internet didn’t exist, and neither did AI.  I’ve had to abandon that book now, because large parts of it have been overtaken by reality.

My reading in the genre has shown me that writers don’t bother worrying about how sentient AIs are made any more.  They just take it as a given.  The issue then becomes turning the AI into a full character with a personality.

So that’s what I’ve done in my rewrite of that old novel.  In the first chapter I have the avatar of the AI sent down the dock to meet his new pilot, which he is very anxious about.  Right from the start the AI has a personality and a history. 

This time I have trained myself to just tell the story and not justify it.  After all, as many science fiction writers point out, we’re writing fiction, so maybe we don’t need to know how every bit of tech works.