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overnight. They can show up as publicly peaceful visitors. We may have to interact with them by means of intergalactic diplomacy, or they might live peacefully among us as citizens without our knowledge.

The Voyage

Stories in many genres can be called 'adventure' stories, in which the protagonist embarks upon a long, eventful journey to complete a quest, return home, or just explore. Science fiction journeys are bigger, better, and crazier. The characters don't have to stay on a particular planet, within a certain galaxy, or even inside their own time! If you're a science fiction author, the entire universe is yours to explore through your characters. This fact is demonstrated erratically and creatively by Douglas Adams in his 'Hitchhiker's Guide' trilogy of four, I mean five.

War

Wars are dependable settings in which to build suspense and tension, creating action on a grand scale. Science fiction warfare may involve aliens (especially invading ones), or the conflict may occur between humans of the future who have intensely more dangerous, more effective, more complex weapons than we use now.

The weapons, of course, don't have to inflict physical damage. Information wars, cold wars, and communication wars are all growing more feasible lately, as the science fiction genre demonstrates. The idea of war itself can even be used as a controlling weapon, as it is in Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four.' Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia!

Utopia vs. Dystopia

Utopias are worlds in which society seems perfect, but isn't - usually, those in power are doing something secretly terrible to keep the utopia running smoothly and happily. On top of that, a single perfect world probably can't work, because people are different, and want different things.

Dystopias are worlds whose societies not only seem terribly frightening, but are. These stories often depict totalitarianism, censorship, torture, and government-sanctioned terrorism. The two most well known works of dystopian fiction are 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' and Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451.'

Both utopias and dystopias show rather negative views of the future, but the latter is scarier, as well as more popular. Some say all utopias are really dystopias, as the idea of a 'perfect world' is impossible to achieve, because the amount of control required to create 'perfection' stomps on so many human freedoms that the process cancels itself out. Pick up Sir Thomas Moore's 'Utopia' and see how many problems you can find with the depicted

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