The problem with writing outré sf/fantasy is it’s entirely like writing for the Babylon Bee these days – today’s outré is merely tomorrow’s reality. Indeed – had I fictionalized the uprising against the Mullahs in Iran, the uncovering of massive fraud in ‘daycare’ in Minnesota, and taking out a dictator from Venezuela – all happening roughly at once, my audience would have rolled their eyes and told me I ought to be more plausible. I think I’ll have to write cozy fiction in which nothing disturbs the even tenor of our lives.
Now, it seems likely – if you dig deep enough- that there may be some links between all of these, and if you dig deep enough, not tenuous ones. But it’s reality. No-one has to suspend disbelief to be sucked into it. ‘It just is, the way Mount Everest is and Alma Cogan isn’t’ (as Monty Python’s Professor of Logic put it). As a writer, you do not have that luxury. The reader needs to willingly suspend disbelief. They may know it is fiction (I know at least one author who got accused of giving away magical secrets… they made up) but the reader is ‘willing to go along with it’, and become absorbed in your imaginary creation. There are a number of tools for this but single most important is the realistic character. The character who is ‘someone they know or have met’ – who just happens to be in a sf/fantasy setting. If you like, fantasy is often the unrealistic happening to the realistic, and them dealing with it, realistically.
The second ‘trick’ is just not to throw too many unconnected strange things at your reader at once (unlike reality). Sf/fantasy has to make sense, be ‘logical’ no matter how weird – This is how you end up with magic being hard work, instead of, well, just magic. So: no 3 crazy events on top of each other, not apparently connected, is fine reality… but not for fiction.
Mad Genius Club 
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