New writing ALIENS Guest Editor MAGGIE GEE introduces her pick of poetry and prose about aliens SOMETIMES the mantra ‘write from what you know’ falls flat. Sometimes what you know seems dull and narrow. It happened to me in 1996. Writing a fast first draft should have a thrilling improvisational quality, a bit like watching a movie. But for some reason I was no longer thrilled by contemporary Britain. Instead I wrote The Ice People, in which feral children roamed through a late 21st Century Europe locked in ice and ravaged by mutant robots. Why write about aliens or robots or cataclysmic change? The answer is simple: liberation - from predictability, domesticity, questions of class, and the necessity of always finding some new experience to write from. Diversity of experience is limited for many women (including me) by the necessity of being home for the children and by uninspiring routine domestic work. Writers are further limited by having to spend so many hours a day with bums on seats. This means it isn’t as easy to gain novelistically useful experience as dental nurses, sea-cooks or genetic engineers. But don’t you have to be some kind of expert to write science fiction? The answer may be ‘yes’ if you want to write genre science fiction for science fiction buffs. I didn’t, though. I wanted to write a novel with similar resources of character and style and form to my other novels, but set in the future. For the complete essay, and for Maggie's' full selection of poetry and prose about aliens, read issue 5 • Subscribe! Read a short story chosen by Maggie Gee: The mad woman and the meteor by Dorothy Schwarz For more on MAGGIE GEE, go to www.contemporarywriters.com
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