Narration and focalisation
An important aspect of how this new world is projected will be deter-
mined by narration and focalisation. Obviously you can use a more distant
heterodiegetic narrator. But it can also be fruitful to make the narrator a
person who is part of that world, and therefore has a perspective moulded
by it. In fact, a defamiliarising exercise in point of view is when a person
from one world looks at another through his or her own eyes. A good
example of this is the poem ‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’ by British
poet Craig Raine (1982, p. 169), where a Martian views our world through
assumptions conceived in his own.
Techniques and triggers
By now you will probably have acquired numerous ideas for constructing
a new world. However, if ideas don’t easily come to you on this topic, you
might like to use a few triggers. Even if you have plenty of ideas, you may
be able, by using these techniques, to arrive at a more unusual conception.
Most writers who construct a new world are negotiating some of these
techniques, though perhaps quite unconsciously.
The techniques are:
- Inversion —One way of creating a new world is inverting what goes on
in this one. So try inverting gender roles or ethical values (so that, for
example, it is considered morally good to steal). - Extension —Take an object or concept and see how much you can
extend it. Begin with an aeroplane and then try to imagine other means
of transport that could be developed, for example, supersonic airlines
that could fly from Sydney to London in half an hour, or interplanetary
travel machines, and so on. - Juxtaposition and recombination —Juxtapose ideas, or events, which
would be unexpected or even impossible in reality. For example, at the
moment, in our world, power is largely associated with money and
position, but perhaps in another world power could be associated with
understanding of the environment. Try putting words/concepts on a
piece of paper:
blood power money sex writing mathematics
illness study light darkness travel
Now try combining these words in unexpected ways. Imagine if
sexual activity took the form of mixing blood, or illness was caused by
study, or power was acquired through illness. It’s a matter of developing
novel ways of thinking about the physical and social world we live in.
Postmodern f(r)ictions 153