Sci-fi in a Fantasy World – Kate Dylan Guest Post

Hello and welcome to this Track of Words guest post, where I’m delighted to welcome author Kate Dylan with a fascinating article exploring some of the differences between science fiction and fantasy, the ways in which some stories work better as SF than F, and what those differences might mean for both writers and readers. If you’ve ever pondered questions like what the difference is between science and magic, or between a tech company and a coven of witches, or how an eight year-old child would end up with a computer implanted in her brain, then this article is going to be of interest!

Kate’s upcoming YA sci-fi novel Mindwalker is due out in September 2022 from Hodder & Stoughton, and having read it I can confirm that it’s fantastic! Have a read of the book’s synopsis below, then check out Kate’s brilliant article…and once you’re done, you can go ahead and pre-order a copy of Mindwalker for yourself!

Here’s the synopsis:

Eighteen-year-old Sil Sarrah is determined to die a legend. In the ten years she’s been rescuing imperilled field agents for the Syntex Corporation – by commandeering their minds from afar and leading them to safety – Sil hasn’t lost a single life. And she’s not about to start now.

She’s got twelve months left on the clock before the supercomputer grafted to her brain kills her, and she’s hell-bent on using that time to cement her legacy. Sil’s going to be the only Mindwalker to ever pitch a perfect game – even despite the debilitating glitches she’s experiencing. But when a critical mission goes south, Sil is forced to flee the very company she once called home.

Desperate to prove she’s no traitor, Sil infiltrates the Analog Army, an activist faction working to bring Syntex down. Her plan is to win back her employer’s trust by destroying the group from within. Instead, she and the Army’s reckless leader, Ryder, uncover a horrifying truth that threatens to undo all the good Sil’s ever done.

With her tech rapidly degrading and her new ally keeping dangerous secrets of his own, Sil must find a way to stop Syntex in order to save her friends, her reputation – and maybe even herself.

Now, over to Kate…

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Kate Dylan: It took me a whole five minutes of being a sci-fi writer to realise that we are living in a fantasy world. I mean, sure, we use SFF as a catch-all term for speculative fiction, but it can sometimes be hard not to feel like that second F is taking up most of the oxygen in the room – especially when you’re not just writing sci-fi, you’re writing YA sci-fi. A notoriously underserved niche.

Which I knew when I started writing my novel, Mindwalker. I was warned. By my agent at the time, by other writers, by the books I could find on shelves…I just don’t think I fully internalised that advice until well after I’d finished the book, because – quite frankly – I was having too much fun with the story to stop.

But before we get too lost in the weeds, let’s just rewind for a second so I can say: I never set out to be a sci-fi writer. I never set out to be a writer at all, to be honest, but 4+ books in, I’m pretty sure that ship has sailed. It’s probably in Fiji by now. The sci-fi ship came later though, after I’d already written three fantasy novels (two of which are available in Germany – but that’s a story for another day). So yeah, that second F? I love it. I love reading it. I love writing it. I love consuming it. Which is why, with a gun to my head, I couldn’t tell you why I chose to write Mindwalker as a sci-fi – sci-fi is just what came out when I started writing, and I didn’t actually start questioning that decision until it came time to shop the book, when I was suddenly faced with the prospect of pitching a very hard sell.

You can find out more about Kate’s German-published Stranded novels here

Now, I won’t bore you with the long, gut-wrenching journey that was selling Mindwalker – let’s just say it took a while to find it the perfect home (and I honestly couldn’t have found a more supportive publisher for it than Hodder & Stoughton and the Hodderscape team). The important thing here is that I expected the sale to be the hardest part – so it took me by surprise when I’d crossed that finish line and my brain was still not…satisfied.

I mean, comparison is the thief of joy, right? Well, I compared myself to death (still learning to manage this better. I imagine it’ll be a career-long battle), to the point where tiny things – i.e. lists of the 25 most anticipated SFF novels coming this summer (of which 22 are fantasy!) would set off my insecurities and make me question the decision to write Mindwalker as a sci-fi book instead of a fantasy.

Which I totally could have done.

The line between science and magic is pretty darn fluid, and as a non-space, non-alien sci-fi, would it really have been that hard to make the main character’s talent for mind control a magical gift instead of a technological one?

Wouldn’t that have made my life so much easier?

And that, dear reader, is how I found myself replotting Mindwalker in my head. Indulging all those what ifs that might have made the book more attractive, more marketable, more likely to find a wider audience.

The setting could absolutely have worked as a magic-filled world instead of a post-apocalyptic, neon dystopia.

The tech company at the heart of it all could have readily become a guild, or a church, or even an order of witches.

The ticking-time bomb slowly killing my main character could easily have come from the cost of using her magic instead of a side-effect of implanting the tech.

Hell, I could probably have even made the themes of consent and bodily autonomy work.

But would they have worked as well?

That’s the question I kept returning to as I tortured myself with this exercise.

It took me a while to put my finger on why the fantasy version of Mindwalker didn’t strike the same chord as the sci-fi version, but eventually, I managed to puzzle it out.

See, the thing about magic is it’s aspirational. That’s the magic of magic: it’s well…magic. It can’t be explained or engineered, manufactured or destroyed. In some worlds, it can be stolen, manipulated, hidden, or faked, but the general rule tends to be: you’re either magic or you’re not.

Magic is not – in most cases – a choice. And above all, Mindwalker is a book about choice. The themes of the novel all stem from the main character’s choice to let a tech corporation implant a deadly computer in her brain – a decision she makes at only eight years old.

What kind of sick, sadistic world would allow an eight-year-old to make this kind of decision, you ask? A world not all that different from our own, actually. A near-future world that’s simply an exaggeration of the current status quo. Which is ultimately the reason Mindwalker has resonated with so many people: it’s not a distant fantasy. It’s not a world that could never exist, no matter how hard we wished it would. It’s a terrifyingly possible possibility.

I have a girl with a supercomputer in her brain – and if that sounds familiar, it’s because Elon Musk has recently announced a similar brain chip initiative (I wrote mine first, okay?)

I have a world where tech corporations wield considerable legislative power – and if that sounds familiar, it’s because lobbyists are paid to do that now. In tech, in pharmaceuticals, in guns, in big tobacco.

I have a story that explores the erosion of privacy, and questions what it means to give uncoerced, informed, and meaningful on-going consent when the world leaves you little choice but to comply – and if that part sounds familiar, well, you’ve probably ticked ‘accept all terms and conditions’ without actually reading them once or twice this past week.

Writing Mindwalker as a near-future sci-fi grounded it in a way I’m not convinced I would have been able to achieve with fantasy, and this, in turn, strengthened the parallels I was drawing between our world and the story world. Which is why I think sci-fi – and cyberpunk specifically – is such a tried and tested vehicle for a handful of themes. To name a few:

• Capitalism as the dystopia
• The dangers of unchecked corporate monopoly and greed
• Experimentation on bodies for militarised work
• The intersection of autonomy, consent, and technological dependence

These are all themes I explore in Mindwalker, and they slot so effortlessly into a cyberpunk world.

None of which is to say that fantasy novels can’t also hold a mirror to our world – they absolutely can! There’s actually been an embarrassment of riches in this department over the past few years. It’s just that for this particular story, a sci-fi setting provided me a more intuitive backdrop for the story I wanted to tell. Had I tried to make the world a fantasy one, I’m not convinced it would have been the same book. In fact, I know it wouldn’t have been. Because the changes required to get it there would have been deep, and sweeping, and not at all superficial. They wouldn’t have only changed the mechanics of the story; they would have changed the feel. And the feel of this novel – the alluring mix of how the hell did our world end up like this and I’ll take one of each of those mods, please – is what I love most about the book.

Mindwalker is a sci-fi book because the steady diet of sci-fi I grew up with drove me to write a sci-fi story. And maybe that’s not the hottest, most marketable type of story, but it’s my story. It’s a story enough people believed in, that I’ll get to see it on shelves. I’ll get to share it with readers.

And honestly, for me, that’s the fantasy.

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Photo credit: Kate Williams

Kate Dylan grew up in a sleepy English town where there was little to do but read, watch movies, and bake. After graduating from the University of the Arts London, she turned her obsession with storytelling and the visual arts into a full-time job as a video editor. But it wasn’t long before she realised that telling other people’s stories wasn’t quite enough; she wanted to tell her own.

Kate’s passion for writing YA novels is fuelled by a love of banter, snark, and all things Marvel. She currently lives in London with her long-suffering boyfriend and their thoroughly indifferent cat.

You can find out more at Kate’s website, and follow her on Twitter.

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Massive thanks to Kate for writing this brilliant article, and for getting involved with Track of Words! I don’t know about you, but I after reading this article I couldn’t wait to get stuck into Mindwalker – it sounded right up my street, and proved to be exactly that. If you’re interested, you can read my review here.

You can pre-order* Mindwalker right now, ahead of its release in September – check out the links below!

*If you buy anything using one of these links, I will receive a small affiliate commission – see here for more details.

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