IF AND SCIENCE FICTION:  A GENRE ARTICLE
Maureen Mason <mmason@igc.org>
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I. Introduction 
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Ever since commercial interactive fiction (IF) came of age in the 1980's,
science fiction (SF) themes have been a natural fit.  Many of the early IF
authors, like the early-adopting home-computer users they were writing
games for, were familiar with classic SF tropes and gadgets, and
incorporated spaceships, supercomputers and intelligent robots into
products like Steve Meretzky's outerspace games, "Planetfall" (Infocom,
1983), "Stationfall" (Infocom, 1987) and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy" (Infocom, 1984).  During that era, even interacting with the IF
parsers themselves seemed a thing of science fiction:  as a player it was
highly pleasurable to get intelligent, often unexpected and witty,
responses from a game; typing in full sentences at the command prompt
created the illusion of talking to a smart computer.  
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In addition, SF is a genre, like Tolkien-style fantasy, in which authoring
and discovering a wholly imaginary world is an elemental pleasure.  Among
SF fans, in fact, good worldbuilding can sometimes carry a story even when
plot or characterization is very thin.  Good SF novels open with
intriguing settings that promise to entertain and surprise.  Take the
first sentence of Dan Simmon's _Hyperion_ (New York, Doubleday, 1989), for
example:
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The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played
Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained
Steinway while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the
swamps below.  (Simmons 3)
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The prospect of exploring an entirely fresh setting is not only one of the
pleasures of SF,  it is also one of the great strengths of IF.  There's
nothing quite like the anticipation of firing up a new game and wondering
where it will take you.  You can't dip into the game's "pages" or browse
ahead the way you can with a book, to see what's coming.  In fact one of
the main rewards for solving IF puzzles has traditionally been that you
then advance to a new area and Read It for the Very First Time (a pleasure
that can never be repeated).  So the marriage of SF's worldbuilding and
IF's active discoveries can be particularly satisfying.  
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Unfortunately SF games, like SF literature, can be an acquired
taste.  Many widely-read and intellectually curious people avoid SF as too
idiosyncratic and self-referential, and rightly complain that SF novels
require too much work or familiarity with *other* SF to be enjoyable for
the newcomer.  In the twenty years since IF was first widely published,
however, literary SF has undergone a sea-change.  Modern science fiction
isn't only about space exploration, or encounters with aliens, or worlds
with futuristic high tech anymore. The boundaries of the genre are
blurring, and non-SF readers are more likely to test the waters.  Fantasy
is invading SF and vice versa.  The genre has attracted more established
authors from other fields who are writing speculative fiction out of their
wider experiences.  The gee-whiz gadget factor in SF plots, while still
alive and kicking, is increasingly taking a back seat to the drama of the
human condition, transplanted to imagined future or alternative
worlds.  This has potential to inspire modern IF and send it off into
interesting directions, perhaps attracting new players to SF games in the
process.
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I. The Pleasures of Classic-Style SF Games 
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Classic SF games drew heavily from the tradition of space exploration in
literary SF, whose settings ranged from Arthur C. Clarke's alien artifacts
and Ray Bradbury's evocative, polymorphing Mars, to all the other worlds
where space adventurers stumble onto a strange planet, or the ruins of an
ancient civilization, or a starship adrift, or an abandoned space outpost
where all the colonists have disappeared or fled.  IF stories written in
this style contain a central puzzle: the PC must figure out how things
work, piece together evidence and solve the mystery of what
happened.   Typically the player, like the PC, gets to poke around,
activating old machines and recording devices, reading records, perhaps
even trying to decipher an alien language.  
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Newer games in this traditional style include Ian Finley's 1997
"Babel" (research station abandoned after a biological disaster), Nate
Cull's 1997 "Glowgrass" (abandoned world with a Planet of the Apes-style
twist), Ross Raszewski's 2001 "Moments Out of Time" (abandoned home in
post-nuclear United States) , Sean Barrett's 2001 "The Weapon" (alien
artifact, with the added obstacle of a hostile colleague who is at once
trying to help and to thwart you), and Paul O'Brian's 2000
"LASH" (plantation abandoned after Second American Civil War).
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One problem with exploring an abandoned landscape, searching for the story
it has to tell, is that it can be a pretty lonely experience, even when
the game gives you a helper-NPC like "Planetfall"'s Floyd or Dig Leader
Cheryl in "The Weapon".  While there are many examples of novel and
affecting aliens in the literary SF genre-ranging from collective
hive-minds to plasma entities inhabiting the core of stars-IF so far has
not told the classic SF story of "first contact", perhaps because it is
challenging enough for an author to realize a normal NPC.  "The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky,
Infocom, 1984) and "Arrival, or Attack of the B-Movie Cliches" (Stephen
Granade, 1998) used humor to create aliens that exhibit all-too-human
traits like vanity and greed, with the author's tongue firmly in
cheek.  Other than "Worlds Apart" (Britton, 1999), in which the player
character turns out to be a very interesting nonhuman on an Earth-like
planet, the SF genre in IF has yet to introduce us to a really, well,
*alien* alien.
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II. The Pleasures of Multi-Genre SF Games 
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There have always been multi-genre SF works in literature, just as in IF,
with an enticing blend of the surreal and the mundane, the historical and
the futuristic, and lately more and more SF writers are moving away from
the traditional SF emphasis on science and the drama of the
machine.  Young authors like Nalo Hopkinson and China Mieville are writing
fabulist novels, while others like Dan Simmons and Maria Doria Russell and
Patricia Anthony have taken the tired old tropes of space exploration and
first contact, and turned them into rich stories about religious faith and
doubt.  There is a lively overlap between SF and other genres, as writers
transplant the hardboiled detective novel to a near-future (Richard
Russo's San Francisco cops) or the romance or historical novel to the
near-past (Kage Baker's California chronoarcheologists).  
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IF that is multi- or meta-genre not only can attract players that don't
normally care for science fiction, it can also make for terrific
games.  One of the oldest IF works of this type, which was decidedly fresh
for its time, was "Trinity" (Moriarity, Infocom, 1986).  The game sneaked
up on you:  there were no time-travel machines, no teleporters, no hi-tech
gear to scare off players who didn't "do" science fiction. You began as a
tourist in a pleasurable if slightly eccentric version of Kensington
Gardens, London but gradually the landscape became more surreal and before
long you were escaping the start of World War III and emerged into a
fantastical world of giant mushrooms, complete with sundials that
distorted time and trellises that distorted space.  The game eventually
took you to Nagasaki, outer space and an atomic research station, among
other real and fantasy settings, and one of its primary pleasures was
discovering how all the parts fit into the whole.  By then, science
fiction fan or no, you were along for the ride. 
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One of the simplest ways for a science fiction writer to blend genres in
IF is to use futuristic technology as simply the framing device for a more
conventional story.  Story hooks like virtual reality booths or time
travel machines offer great flexibility to an author who wants to tell an
SF story that appeals to an audience broader than hardcore SF fans, given
that the PC can be transported to settings ranging from historical palace
intrigue to present-day romance to classic locked-room murder mystery.       
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A pioneer in this tradition of layering realities was "A Mind Forever
Voyaging" (Steve Meretzky, Infocom, 1985), which used the framing device
of a computer simulation to land the PC in a naturalistic city, complete
with a wife and child and a life of his own, and then charged the player
as well as the PC to explore and assess the changes in that society over
time.  The city felt wonderfully open-ended and well-realized, even though
it fell far short of the standards for realism today, because its
constraints-you could only interact with a small number of citizens and
most buildings couldn't be entered, for example-felt like a limitation of
the simulation, not of the parser or the game itself.
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Another benefit of the time travel/VR/multiple realities framing device
for IF authors is that it's easy to give the PC a motivation to explore
and discover his or her identity and goals, without resort to a clumsy
plot device like amnesia.  It's not unusual in these games for the PC to
be as much a newcomer to the game's setting as the player.  Whether it's
the Professor waking up as a dead guy in the ruins of his underwater lab
in "Till Death Makes a Monkfish Out of Me" (Jon Ingold and Mike Sousa,
2002), or the time traveler in "Vicious Cycles" (Simon Mark, 2001) trying
to thwart a terrorist plot, or Arthur Dent turning up as "Phil" at a party
in Islington in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (Douglas Adams &
Steve Meretzky, Infocom, 1984), the PC typically is confused at first has
no idea what to do-just like the player.
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III. We're not in Kansas anymore
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Authors of science fiction have always faced a special challenge:  if you
drop your reader into a story where daily life is full of futuristic
technology, how do you bring him or her up to speed on the basic life
skills the protagonists already understand?  A reader immersed too
suddenly into a world of farcasters, warpdrives, black I.C.E. or
nanotechnology is a reader frustrated and distracted from the story.  This
dilemma is even more acute for authors of IF.  Readers who don't
"get" elements of an SF novel's setting can keep reading, or skimming,
even if they fail to experience the novel as intended.  An IF player who
loses a full visual sense of the world and how things work there will
probably get stuck.  In games with puzzles, there's no skimming.
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Although the maxim "show not tell" applies to SF novels as well as SF
games, there's nothing wrong with openly instructing a reader about the
world instead of weaving all the details into the scenes themselves.  "The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (Adams & Meretzky, Infocom, 1984) used
whimsical footnotes to fill in details about the gameworld and the note
command was incorporated in later SF games like the Unnkulian series,
e.g., "The Legend Lives!" (Baggett, Great Underground Adventures,
1994).  The Guide itself, and indeed all games containing Guide-like
encyclopedias crafted more for the player rather than the player
character, demonstrates that exposition does not have to kill the momentum
of the narrative, particularly when it's delivered in an entertaining
style.  
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IF's great strength, however, is that the player can learn by doing.  The
most satisfying way for an game to accomplish the task of familiarizing
the player with an unusual setting is by making the invented, unfamiliar
elements of the setting into puzzles that the player can work out.  
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In "Kaged" (Ian Finley, 2000), for example, the PC is a faceless
bureaucrat in a 1984- or Brazil-style law enforcement institution who is
newly emboldened to break the rules and explore.  The obstacles he
encounters in moving around the Citadel of Justice and obtaining necessary
items serve as puzzles for the player.  They also paint a world of
pervasive surveillance, Rube Goldberg-esque regulations, officious (and
suspicious) underlings, and total conformity enforced by the threat of
violence.
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In "Worlds Apart" (Suzanne Britton, 1999),  the nature and powers of the
PC, as well as the social and natural structure of the gameworld, are
slowly revealed through exploration and conversation.  The game includes
nontraditional puzzles such as an instruction session with a mentor who
encourages the PC to learn her abilities through trial and error, giving
the player a pleasurable surprise when an action works, like using a
muscle for the very first time.
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Whether their games are more or less puzzle-driven, IF authors can learn
from the techniques of good SF writers who rely less on exposition or
familiarity with the familiar conventions of traditional SF (e.g., how
time-travel paradoxes and faster-than-light-travel work) and instead
convey the invented or high-tech elements of their gameworlds with a light
touch.  Admittedly it is much easier for a novelist to show a character
using say, a Hawking mat, than it is for an IF author to make a Hawking
mat available to the PC-who should already know what it is, and what to do
with it-and then clue the player sufficiently well that the *player* knows
what to do with it, too.  One solution is to leave the high tech or
fantastical elements in the background, if they cannot be readily made
into puzzles in the foreground, and let the player's actions be focused on
other aspects of the drama, such as character interaction, while little
details of the world seep in.
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Editor: I planned to put in a paragraph here with an example of a novel
that conveys an invented future world through background elements and
doesn't intrude with infodumps or alienate the new SF reader.   Maureen
McHugh's "China Mountain Zhang" may be too soft a SF novel for a good
example, so I'm still thinking.  I'm also open to suggestions.
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IV.  Conclusion 
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At its best, the SF genre provides the same pleasure as any other good
piece of interactive fiction-engaging characters in an entertaining story
with good, integrated puzzles along the way-with an added spice:  the
worlds in this genre are decidedly fresh.  The mixing of styles and the
new perspectives that are invigorating literary SF may inspire current and
new IF authors, and attract players who will be surprised to discover that
they enjoy science fiction after all.
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Meanwhile, IF authors and players alike should keep an eye on the written
SF genre.  In 1995 Neal Stephenson in _The Diamond Age_ made an IF story
the centerpiece of his novel, introducing an intelligent book, the "Young
Lady's Illustrated Primer" that used interactive stories to teach his
young picaresque heroine how to survive in a technologically and socially
complex world.  SF is not only a great source of story ideas for IF,  it
is also imagining IF's future.  
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WORKS CITED
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Books
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Simmons, Dan. _Hyperion_.  New York, Doubleday, 1989.
Stephenson, Neal. _The Diamond Age_. New York, Bantam, 1995.
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Note to Editors: Please let me know if you prefer me to give cites to
relevant works of the authors I mentioned by name at the beginning of Part
II, i.e., Hopkinson, Mieville, Simmons, Russell, Anthony, Russo, and
Baker.
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Games
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Adams, Douglas and Meretzky, Steve.  "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy".  Infocom, 1984.
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Baggett, David.  "The Legend Lives!".  Great Underground Adventures, 1994,
1996.
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Barrett, Sean. "The Weapon".  2001.
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Britton, Suzanne. Worlds Apart, 1999
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Cull, Nate.  "Glowgrass".  1997.
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Finley, Ian. "Babel". 1997.
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---. "Kaged". 2000.
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Granade, Stephen.  "Arrival, or Attack of the B-Movie Cliches".  1998
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Lebling, Dave. "Starcross".  Infocom, 1982.
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Mark, Simon.  "Vicious Cycles".  2001
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Meretzky, Steve.  "A Mind Forever Voyaging".  Infocom, 1985.
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---.  "Planetfall".  Infocom, 1983
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---.  "Stationfall".  Infocom, 1987.
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Moriarity, Brian.  "Trinity".  Infocom, 1986.
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O'Brian, Paul.  LASH, 2000.
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Raszewski, L. Ross. "Moments Out of Time".  2001.