Character Psychology in Science Fiction: People Under Impossible Pressure
AUD 1,050
Programme
What this masterclass covers
Course Program
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Module 1 — Baseline and deviation
Establishing a clear psychological baseline for your character before introducing the science fiction element. Why this step is usually skipped and why skipping it causes problems later.
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Module 2 — Isolation and long duration
Characters in space, in exile, in extended solitude. What extended isolation actually does to cognition and social behaviour, and how to render that on the page without melodrama.
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Module 3 — Memory and identity
Stories involving memory manipulation, uploading, or loss. The philosophical questions are well-known; the craft questions are less discussed. How does a character with altered memory narrate their own past?
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Module 4 — Collective and distributed consciousness
Writing characters who are part of a hive mind or network. Point of view challenges and how published fiction has handled them with varying success.
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Module 5 — Cognitive enhancement and its costs
Enhanced intelligence, altered perception, accelerated cognition. The temptation to write these characters as simply better. Why that choice tends to flatten narrative tension.
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Module 6 — Workshop and revision
Participants bring a scene featuring a psychologically complex character in an extreme scenario. Structured group feedback.
About this material
Skills developed through this programme
Science fiction puts characters in situations that have no historical precedent. A character who has lived for 200 years, or who shares consciousness with a network, or who has had memories selectively removed — how does that person actually think? What do they want? What do they fear?
Generic character advice does not answer these questions. This masterclass works specifically on the gap between human psychology as we know it and the altered or extreme versions that science fiction requires.
The approach
Sessions draw on published research in psychology and neuroscience — not to make the fiction scientifically accurate, but to give writers a more precise vocabulary for imagining internal states that differ from ordinary experience.
Instructor Yannick Oduya has a background in clinical psychology and has been writing science fiction for fifteen years. He is careful to distinguish between what research suggests and what remains genuinely open, and he applies the same rigour to the fiction he reads and writes.
Who this is for
Writers who already have a working draft or project and are finding that their characters feel thin relative to the scale of the scenario they are placed in. Some experience with science fiction as a reader is assumed.
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