How Much Science Do You Like in Your Science Fiction?
I’ve been working on a couple of science fiction stories on and off for the past few months. I’ve mentioned them here before. They are set in a world where humans settled colonies on the moon. There five colonies — one for each of the major players in the space race. For a while, those colonies were dependent on Earth for resources, but after a century or so, technology developed enough that they were able to sustain themselves. Their world is full of domed cities, maglev trains, space shuttles, grav boots, terraforming, and atmo-packs.
When you read stories like that, do you want to know how these things work, or can you accept the idea and move on, suspending any disbelief?
Some of those things have a real basis in science. I actually read about a maglev train that has been proposed between L.A. and Las Vegas. And others on that list I’ve read about in many sci-fi stories over the years, even if I don’t know much about how they would actually be expected to work.
Personally, while I don’t mind descriptions of science in my sci-fi stories, I don’t really need it. I don’t care to know how a replicator, an android, a faster-than-light engine, or a ray gun work. I just want to know what they do and to see how they will be used in the story. If I can suspend my disbelief about magic in a fantasy realm, I can do the same for technology in a sci-fi world. All I want is a well-written story that establishes a world and treats it consistently all the way through.
One thing that gave me pause in the stories I’m writing, though, was a global event. The premise in one of the stories was that a cloud layer appeared, cutting the lunar colonies off from Earth. No communications, telescopes, etc., could penetrate, so the colonists didn’t know if everyone was dead or what. But that one turned out to be really difficult to write, because I kept thinking that the story wouldn’t be believable unless I actually had some scientific basis for why the cloud layer appeared.
How about you? Does one way or the other for technology or events/changes bug you when you’re reading sci-fi?
Maybe I should set a goal for myself — to finish one of these stories over my Christmas vacation.
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In general I don’t think it’s all that important. When I think of “hard” science fiction, I think of Arthur Clark (whom I love), and now that I think about it he doesn’t get all that technical. I’m sure his knowledge of technology, which was vast, informed his stories, but he never got bogged down in technobabble. See Tom Clancy for someone who can get bogged down in technical detail.
I think as long as you establish logical rules and stick with them, and have your scientist characters behave in a scientific fashion, you’re good to go.
It’s not necessary, but a dash of it can definitely enrich a story. Just make sure that what you have is solid.
Heinlein does an excellent job of using science well; check “Starman Jones” or “Friday” for that. Lois McMaster Bujold also uses science very well. Her “Falling Free” is basically structured around an engineering problem as the conflict, but she makes it accessible and fascinating.
Joe Haldeman’s “The Forever War” does a great job of using science. It mainly deals with the incredible lag-time of space travel. Soldiers travel at faster-than-light speeds to distant planets to fight the enemy. When they get back, to them it’s been six months, but on earth it’s been eighty years. An exaggeration of the veteran’s feeling of discontinuity from home, applied to great effect. He also uses science to make his hostile planetscapes more deadly, to describe in greater detail the incredible forces employed by the futuristic weapons, making everything much more interesting.
But once you start, make sure to keep it believable and consistent. It’s okay to have rockets blasting off for the moon every hour, but you must note how expensive that’d be, for example. I think if a giant cloud covered the earth, and you have a colony of scientists on the moon, one of these scientists would do some quick math and figure out, “Without a sun, everyone on Earth would be dead in…. two months.” Sunspots can wreak havoc with communications - how about that? Or an EM spike from the sun, bombardment of radio waves caused by a distant supernova, or just a big earthquake that screws with the world’s EM field and disrupts communications. Maybe magnetic north suddenly shifts one-fourth of the way around the planet! That would screw everything up. Mexico would be the north pole and the arctic would be the tropics.
I’ll just chime in to confirm what Alex and Jens have already said. To me, logical application of gadgets and attention to the small details of how they affect day-to-day living are important, not lengthy scientific explanations.
Remember, too; just because something big and nasty happens doesn’t mean that your protagonists understand what has happened — even if they are scientists. They may have theories and they may do everything they can to figure it out, but possession of technology, even vast technology, doesn’t automatically lead to instant understanding.