The curse of practicality

 I'm reading a galaxy-spanning science fiction book right now.  The book is huge in size as well as in the scope of its ideas. And I have to say that I feel very intimidated by it.

It's the ease with which the author comes up with breathtaking grand ideas, and then uses known science to justify those inventions, that's the most intimidating.  I didn't know much about this author as a person besides her work, so I looked her up.  I expected to find that she'd trained as some kind of hard scientist, but I was wrong.  Her degree is in the humanities.  Which left me wondering how she could have such a grasp of such a wide span of scientific concepts without having studied them.

So that was one way she intimidated me.  A second was with the enormous scope of her vision.  She had invented a massive universe with dozens of aliens, several different political systems, and enormous number of planets and space stations, and she'd got her main character onto an ancient alien spaceship.

At several points in the story I found myself stopping to try and work out the practicalities of how some thing could've happened, like dubious explanations of how people who had, on the face of it been blown to pieces, could still be alive.

And this is my curse as a science fiction writer.  Sometimes I'm far too practical to be writing science fiction.  I'm never going to have one of those galaxy-spanning, big picture, high concept blockbuster stories.  Because my mind doesn't work that way.

I love Juliet McKenna's Green Man series of contemporary rural fantasy books.  There she has people who can transform instantly into swans and hares.  She does deal with some practical problems of the transformation, like what do do with your keys and 'phone when you transform, but she doesn't even try to explain why a human can totally shift their physiology to become a swan instantly.

I admire that kind of writing.  Those books work spectacularly, and the reader accepts the transformations completely.  The trouble comes when I want to write the same sort of thing.  I have an idea about conservationists who can transform into big cats.  I did try out the idea in a short story for Christmas at my local writers' circle, and I think that worked.  But whether I'll be able  to sustain that for a full novel is a whole other thing.

I don't have to write galaxy-spanning science fiction to be a writer in the genre, but I always somehow think I'm not being bold enough, that I'm too tied to today's practicalities to produce anything really stunning.