Everyday Details in Far-Out Fiction
by Donna Farley

“I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more, Toto.”

Dorothy’s observation upon arriving in Oz pinpoints one of the main reasons readers dive into fantasy and science fiction: to be swept away to a strange time and place, where things are not quite like they are at home. SF and fantasy readers are in love with the road less traveled, the far horizons and dark continents, the limitless possibilities of time and space. 

Big Differences, Small Details

The most successful fantasy worlds are those founded on something big and basic that is different from the world we know. On Anne McCaffrey’s Pern, for instance, a whole society is built around the flying dragons that fight the parasitic Threads; in Xanth, author Piers Anthony makes un-magical things the exception rather than the rule; in the Star Trek universe, warp-drive enables the exploration of a galaxy replete with diverse alien cultures.

Such fundamental strangeness in your fantasy world needs to be addressed at the rock-bottom level of your world-building. The standard faux-medieval setting for fantasy has become ho-hum; readers and editors want to visit worlds that are truly alien and exotic. But once you have established a unique matrix for your world, it would be a shame to miss one of your best opportunities to create suspension of disbelief—and that is in the small, mundane, everyday details.

When you visit a foreign country for the first time, it’s often the little things that really bring home the reality of strangeness. Discovering your hair dryer won’t work on European current without an adapter, for instance, or shops shutting down in Spain for siesta. In foreign cultures we discover our fellow humans have attitudes, diets, and daily routines that differ from our own, sometimes slightly, sometimes very sharply indeed.

Now let’s look at our fantasy people. So your characters have thaumaturgical powers or biotechnological implants. They know how to carve a sea serpent into sushi with a sword, or reverse the polarity on the neutron flow. But what do they eat for lunch? Do they have life insurance? How often do they bathe?

I’m not suggesting you punctuate your narrative with episodes of tea-drinking or morning shaves. As Donald Maass notes in Writing the Breakout Novel, those kinds of scenes can leech the tension right out of your story. Rather than suspending your readers’ disbelief, a detailed narration of the fantasy equivalent of a coffee break is guaranteed to bore readers into putting the book down. What I’m after is the telling detail, dropped in casually, unobtrusively, while the action of the story continues around it.

A splendid example from the Harry Potter books: the Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans that burst surprisingly on the tongues of Harry and his friends as they travel to school on the Hogwarts Express. The assorted candies include perfectly mundane fruit flavors, but also such distinctly un-ordinary ones as spinach, liver, or earwax—and you don’t know for sure which until you try them! You can practically taste them as you read, and the thought makes you squirm at the same time as delighting you.

When we encounter those Every Flavor Beans, we really know we aren’t in our ordinary world any more. And yet it is very close to the world we know. Real kids on their way to school do eat candy; in the world of Hogwarts, they just eat candy that’s a little different….

This is an important key to grabbing and holding your readers’ attention. The most sympathetic SF and Fantasy characters, though they may have mystical mind-reading powers, or stand ten feet tall and sprout blue fur, still have some basic things in common with us normal 21st Century types. Like us, they feel pain, hunger, fear, amusement, embarrassment. They need food, clothing, companionship, toilet facilities. They have parents and pasts to make peace with.

And like us, they take the everyday realities of their own world for granted. We have cell phones and professional sports, they have magic spells and swordplay. The outer forms are different, but the meanings are the same.

Here is a telling detail from Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan space opera series: her “comconsoles” are similar to our computers, with some futuristic added bells and whistles. But she is not satisfied with that, and carries the idea one step further, making a unique detail serve multiple purposes in this snippet from Mirror Dance: “The Countess was at her comconsole, not a secured government model, just a very expensive commercial one. Shell flowers inlaid on black wood framed the vid plate….”

A throwaway detail, with no impact on the narrative. But it is simply right for the story. Barrayar is a formerly backward planet, re-connected within the last generation to the Galactic culture and technology. This comconsole is not just a technological tool, but also a piece of fine furniture, ornate and proper to the household of a powerful family in a feudal society. This one casual detail speaks volumes about the un-selfconscious wealth of the Vorkosigan family, and the contradictions and tensions of the Barrayaran society they live in.

Taking a Leaf from Historical Fiction Writers

At the beginning of her comic time travel novel, To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis quotes Gustave Flaubert: “God is in the details”. Willis heeds her own advice. Among other minutiae of Victorian life, one fascinating detail makes a running joke. The hapless time traveler, Ned, who has been sent on a sort of scavenger hunt through time, keeps buying small things at church fundraising sales. Most puzzling to him of these are some crocheted items in the shape of pansies and roses called “penwipers”. Only late in the book does he finally discover that they are intended for wiping pens. A stranger from several centuries hence, he had been unfamiliar with the ordinary fact of 19th-century life that the pens of the day were used by dipping them in an inkwell, and would need to be wiped off before being put away.

The historical fiction writer has many such details at her fingertips, if she has researched well, and the fantasy or science fiction writer may take a leaf from her book (Did you catch the strangeness of that present-day colloquialism? Already we refer more commonly to the “pages” of a book, not leaves. In the future, when e-books are the norm, perhaps the idea of taking a leaf from a book will be as strange as the idea of wiping pens!)

Here is a bit from a historical fantasy of my own, set in ninth-century Northumbria. The young hero, rebuked for setting his sights on a girl above his class, admits to himself:

“I owned not a single perch-length of land to offer as morning-gift.”

We can guess from the context that “morning-gift” is a kind of dowry offered to the bride. But the reader doesn’t need to know what a “perch-length” comes to in square meters. I don’t know offhand myself. Nevertheless, it’s clear this is the Anglo-Saxon measure for the smallest unit of land. The word itself can be as foreign to the reader as Elvish or Klingon, and the point will still come across. In this case, I’ve used an actual Anglo-Saxon term—but in a whole-cloth fantasy world, you can use such terms in a made-up language without needing to explain them or give them in a glossary.

Klah, to take a Pernese example, is a coffee-equivalent, but author Anne McCaffrey never steps out of the Pernese characters’ viewpoints to tell the reader that. The speakers, the characters, take such terms for granted as everyday details. The readers can catch the exotic flavor of an alien world from the casual use of a “foreign language” term like this, without being distracted from the flow of the story.

Other small details of dialogue, such as the swear words and clichés of your fantasy culture, can add to the verisimilitude of the story. “Shards!” McCaffrey’s dragonriders exclaim. That’s the Pernese way of saying “Nonsense!”, referring to the eggshells that remain after a dragonet hatches. For them to say “Baloney!” instead would be worse than weak—it would actually jar the reader out of the fantasy world. The Pernese don’t have baloney, so such an expression is out of place.

The Power of Sensory Detail

As with other details in our fiction, these little bits of fantasy culture are most effective when we employ all the senses. Use of the sense of taste, for instance, which is so powerful and yet so often neglected in descriptive prose, is part of what makes the Every Flavor Beans in Harry Potter so vivid and memorable.

How often have you seen a fantasy story open with a character gazing out on a landscape? But in the lyrical, humorous extended passage that opens Walter Wangerin’s zoomorphic fantasy The Book of the Dun Cow, we find ourselves quite in the dark, and it is mostly sound and not sight that tells us what kind of world and characters we are about to become acquainted with. Wangerin turns the familiar, mundane sound of a rooster’s crow into something out of the ordinary when the ill-tempered Chauntecleer is unexpectedly awakened … “‘Cock-a, cock-a’ he started to say, but that wasn’t loud enough, not nearly furious enough… ‘Cock-a-doodle, cock-a-doodle,’ and still that wasn’t what he wanted. It should have some cursing in it… ‘Cock a-MAMIE! Cock-a-cock-a BULL! COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!’”

The visual sense we cling to most can also be made to produce something extraordinary in the way of convincing mundane details for your fantasy world. I once attended a poetry workshop where the instructor thought she was proposing something exceptional by suggesting the students try to imagine a completely new color. But the great fantasy writers have been there already: Terry Pratchett’s eighth color, octarine, the color of magic, is a fact of life in Discworld; and for the cloaks of the Torturers’ Guild in his Book of the New Sun series, Gene Wolfe dredges up an archaic word, fuligin, to describe a color that is darker than black.

Don’t forget the sense of smell. It is especially powerful in tapping into characters’ emotions and memories. Bujold’s hero, Miles Vorkosigan, leads a double life; when he boards a space ship, the dry tang of recycled air helps trigger all the mannerisms and habits of his alter ego, spacefaring mercenary commander Admiral Naismith. The readers have (most of us) never been on a space ship, but we have had that experience of memories and feelings rushing in upon us when we encounter some long-forgotten odor. We identify with Miles in his experience, and consequently feel as if we are right there on the ship with him.

The somatic senses too—touch on the skin, the movement of air, temperature, balance—can come into play in powerful ways in science fiction and fantasy. C.S. Lewis’s Voyage to Venus is a sensual delight in itself, but one of the chief accomplishments of Lewis’s mastery of description is to communicate the alienness of his imagined environment. Lewis’s Venus is a globe of warm seas dotted with floating islands, and through his hero Ransom’s experience of phenomena “normal” to Venus he helps the reader glimpse things hard for the earthbound to imagine: “…for the next hour or two he was teaching himself to walk. It was much harder than getting your sea-legs on a ship, for whatever the sea is doing the deck of the ship remains a plane. But this was like learning to walk on water itself. It took him several hours to get a hundred yards away from the edge, or coast, of the floating island; and he was proud when he could go five paces without a fall, arms outstretched, knees bent in readiness for sudden change of balance…he would have learned more quickly if his falls had not been so soft…”

Flaubert and Willis are right: God is in the details. Whether your setting is far future or misty past, your theme the workings of magic or interstellar travel, a judicious use of “mundane” details can bring your story to life, help the reader suspend disbelief, and make them identify with your characters. And that will help you accomplish your aim in writing—to grab the audience’s attention and keep them reading through to the end.