I made a new account to post this guide because I want my words to speak for themselves without any of you knowing my reputation or seeing my writing. I wouldn't want you to accept what I say SIMPLY because it was posted by me. That's why I did this.
If you are perusing this guide, there is a decent chance that you know how to read, which is a fantastic start. To begin with, let's identify what FT really means. Well, on NationStates there are (from what I've gathered) generally five tech levels of writing:
FanT/Fantasy: Things that could never happen in life by virtue of them being magical or otherwise divine. But in reality it's ponies. It's just ponies.
PT/Past Tech: Things that could have certainly occurred in the past with past levels of technology. So essentially swords and nothing else.
MT/Modern Tech: Things that are happening today or certainly could occur today with our technology. Think AK-47s, Molotov cocktails, and AT-AT imperial walkers, and weakass, stupid razor beams that nobody cares about.
PMT/Post-Modern: Things that could very well happen within our lifetime! Think Thorium power and kind of cool razor beams that you actually see and can kill people.
FT/Future Tech: Things that will definitely not be read within our lifetime! The best made up razor beams available; they can slice right through even the strongest armor that is also made up.
We will be focusing primarily on Future Tech or FT in this guide. The first thing that you need to understand is that FT is basically the cool kids if this were high school, which is the only social hierarchy that we have a good frame of reference for. FT is the jocks, but instead of playing sports really well, or lifting and honing our bodies really well, or running really well, we write and that's the end of that sentence.
Do you know Heinlein? Asimov? Bradbury? The best selling founders of modern Science Fiction as we know it who, collectively, have sold quite literally hundreds of millions of volumes of novels? Well, forget all of that trash because proper FT writing on NationStates is completely unrecognizable from any of it. Now if you're a new user to NationStates, you might be saying "But Random Internet Guy, isn't FT fundamentally science fiction?"
First of all, don't fucking interrupt me you cretin. Second, no. They're completely different as I will now elucidate with the following revelations:
Revelation 1: Clarke's Third Law
Clarke's Third Law dictates that any technology that is sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. Yeah, you see that? You see how smart I seem? You too could seem smarter than you really are by citing Clarke's Third Law early, often, and in contexts that often make no sense. When in doubt, just fucking start your post with a floating, italicized copypaste of Clarke's Third Law. For bonus points, don't call it Clarke's Third Law; just reference it as being from some ancient philosopher or something. People will go nuts over that.
Revelation 2: Very Strict Rules
Good. Art. Has. Rules. Lots of rules. What artist, literature or otherwise, have you ever heard of that didn't bend over backwards adhering to a dizzying number of often self-contradictory rules concerning their artwork? Picasso doesn't count, he was communist. Once you eliminate all artists who were communist, socialist, did drugs, had brown hair, had blue eyes, or didn't do drugs you can see quite clearly that you have no examples of any successful artists who didn't follow a ton of rules.
Thankfully, FT writing has rules. So many rules, in fact, that it's not sufficient merely to list the rules! HAH! You peasant! You thought that was enough? No, we require a glossary of terms for the rules! Any writing that does not have rules that are at least as long as the Napoleonic Code are essentially not art. The first and most important rule is that you need to talk about the rules very, very often and explain that anyone who doesn't follow those rules is dogshit. Every other rule follows self-evidently from that rule so I won't bother to list them here.
Revelation 3: 60/30/20
When writing FT on NationStates you want to engage with the 60/30/20 rule. Effectively you want your writing to focus on, in order:
How fucking awesome your made up technology is: 60% of your content
How fucking awesome and PEW PEW your setting is: 30% of your content
Your characters and plot or whatever: 20% of your content
If you're like me and your therapist is like mine, you've never read about a single character that you haven't utterly despised for the following reasons:
A: They aren't you.
2: They aren't talking about you.
C: They don't even have the fucking decency to be thinking about you and how awesome you are all the time.
Writing FT isn't about others reading it. If it were, it would obviously be completely different. It's about you writing it. And you're the narrator. So that means everything should focus on all the cool shit that you, the narrator/author/God, devised. You have to let everyone else know, very loudly, how much awesomer and niche your completely fictitious technology is. If they read what you wrote, that is, which... yaknow. Big roll of the dice on that one.
Also, people want vast infodumps about the weird places you made up with acidic gasses and gassy acids and gravity that makes your parents love you. So be sure to intersperse your descriptions of your amazing razor beams with vast walls of text describing your planets and society. You get to choose between two futuristic societies:
-"We're a perfect Utopia, everything's perfect, fight me!"
OR
-"We basically took Bladerunner and replaced some of it with Cyberpunk, but also everything's perfect and we're powerful, fight me!"
The good news about your choices (of which there are only the two above) is that you can use either one of them to deliver an incredibly hamfisted critique of Capitalism! Notoriously, everyone loves that and finds it incredibly interesting to read. Examples of novels where the author shoehorned their ideological critiques into the setting include such page turners as Atlas Shrugged, Anthem, and everything that was written by college freshmen who grew up in the suburbs.
Revelation 4: All of your characters are badasses.
Yup. Every single one. Like, obviously, spend as little time writing about them as possible. Their motivations, if they have any, should be nebulous and barely mentioned. Your characters, 100% of the time, do what is best for your nation or what portrays you in the most flattering light. But when you do briefly come up for air from talking about how much cooler your cyborgs are and how much more Bladerunner your dystopia is (but still with a really powerful navy) to talk about your characters, they all have to be badass. First of all, 90% of your characters should basically be stand-ins for you, the author/God. The few that are not should be less badass than 90% of your characters, but still super badass and awesome.
Remember, the mark of a good writer is that your recurring characters fundamentally have almost no flaws (just like you). If you feel like writing about a flawed character, you make one up, write about them once, and then kill them or else they're never heard of again. It's good to have some flawed one-time or minor characters because they make your more badass characters stand out that much more.
Revelation 5: Fundamentally refuse to acknowledge that FT is basically the same thing as FanT but without ponies.
Some people will read what you write and say that, on the surface, it seems conceptually the same as FanT except without ponies (thankfully) and with a little veneer of "sciency" lacquered over what is basically just magic. It is important that you rebuff this take for a variety of reasons:
-FanT isn't as cool as we say we are.
-FanT doesn't allow you to larp as a gainfully employed scientist
-We understandably do not want to be associated with anthropomorphic ponies who, with alarming regularity, find themselves in compromising situations with strong sexual overtones.
First of all, cite Clarke's Third Law at them because that makes you seem smart even though it arguably defeats your point completely. Second, prove that it's not the same by having one or two theoretical scientific concepts from real life baked into your writing. Things that we can prove on a theoretical level but that technology just hasn't caught up to yet. Like Bussard Ramjets or fully functioning McDonald's Soft Serve machines.
Revelation 6: Refuse to be impressed by other people's technology or settings
Your characters are too badass to be impressed by anything you didn't write.
Revelation 7: Grammar/Spelling/Plot/Character Development
Ehh, do your best.
