Sci-Fi Writers: Soft, hard, or somewhere between (quasi-solid)?

[BrianKittrell]

I'm interested in writing some sci-fi in the future (undetermined span of time), and I'm just curious as to how deep you get into the science behind the fiction. Ultra-deep? So farcical that you have to ignore (not just suspend) reality to get into it?

Star Wars seems to work well without much explanation for anything, while Star Trek makes a huge fuss about explaining the technology and science behind everything they encounter. Dune, on the other hand, explains some of the tech and science, but it's mostly about people, story, and faith.

I suppose the proper question is: How deep do you research your hard or semi-hard science fiction? Are you willing to just throw it out there and say, "It just is because it's 2870524 years in the future" or do you at least attempt to fit it into real science logically (which is rather difficult considering that, most of the time, we're looking at 100% theoretical situations)?

[Krista D. Ball]

It depends. I wrote a military SF, so I considered what kinds of weaponry would be used, where weaponry is going, and tried to go with a mix of things. It's important to sell your technobabble to your readers

If you do hard SF, it needs to be science fact or, at least, science probable.

[Kevis 'The Berserker' Hendrickson]

You can get away with a lot if you're writing space opera as opposed to writing Hard SF. Even then, you still need to have your facts straight. My suggestion is to do as much research as you can to keep the science in your story as real as possible. For instance, my upcoming Rogue Hunter novel delves heavily into biotechnology. I had to do a lot of research on viruses and bacteria to keep my facts straight. Even then, one of my beta-readers who is quite knowledgeable about biology tore me a new one over some of the liberties I took with using viruses in the story. I've learned that I have to assume that readers of science fiction are going to know more than I do about science and technology and have to work twice as hard to make sure the fiction doesn't make a mockery of the science.

[Edward M. Grant]

Firm most of the time; I think the only fanciful part of 'Final Contact' is the faster-than-light drive and the story didn't work without it. The novel I'm working on doesn't have anything I couldn't at least hand-wave into existence.

Though part of it is set on Vesta so it's tricky to write when NASA are only just getting close-up imagery .

[Monique]

I prefer non-Newtonian liquid SF.

[Cliff Ball]

I may enjoy Star Trek, but in no way do I want to write a bunch of technobabble. I prefer soft sci-fi when I write, but I have mentioned ion star drives or fusion engines, but that's about it.

[Seanathin23]

The Sci-fi I write when I get back to it, is relitivly soft, mosly it is a massive military political epic that happons to take place in space, so I don't worry to much about the sciance, it gets in the way of the fun some times.

[ErikHyrkas]

Even though my book is meant to be fun and light, I still tried to keep the science plausibly real.  In areas of science with two competing theories, I always screwed my characters over.  In areas without enough research, I always screwed my characters over.  In well known areas, I usually found a way for it to work against my characters.  Sometimes, when you are a protagonist, there really is somebody out to get you.

Between having a wife who is a science teacher and having a bit of a physics background myself, I couldn't help but be mostly real.  Or at least plausible.  I still had one of my proofreaders question/challenge the validity of virtually every science related event.  I like reading fantasy, but writing sci fi has been interesting.  It would be nice to invent magic without people demanding that you explain yourself every page.

[Rykymus]

As a reader, I don't want to read about how some fictional tech works. That's where I start skimming ahead. It's extremely rare that "how" something works has any actual impact on the story. The only thing that's important is understanding what the tech can and cannot do, and staying true to that throughout the story, as those limitations are what drives the story. (At least to me.) Although I've seen every single episode of anything Star Trek, there were always two things I didn't like; Everyone is so honorable and dedicated and perfect. (Just once I'd like to have seen one of them late for a "Red Alert" because they were on the can.) And just as soon as someone says it can't be done, someone's going to figure out a way to do it.

As a writer, I never explain anything unless I absolutely have to. As long as I am quite sure about how it works (science-based or magic-tech) then I can sell it to the readers. That said, I also try not to break the laws of physics as we know them, unless I cannot tell the story without doing so. And it's okay to bend or even break those laws. It is, after all, Science "Fiction".

I have a quote on my wall near my desk to remind me. I can't remember who said it. (Heinlein or Bradbury, I think.) "Don't tell stories about rocket ship or robots, but about people. Everything else is window dressing. World build, yes, but only to support the story." But as a 'newb', I'm pretty sure I'm not telling any of you anything that you don't already know.

[Doomed Muse]

It depends on the story.  I've written everything from space opera to near-future crunchy SF.  Story comes before science, for me. The science should support and fit with the story and each one will require different levels.

Another thing to remember is that no matter how correct your science might be or how carefully you extrapolate from what we know into the theoretical to try to come up with realistic future science, you'll always get readers who think you are wrong.  That's life. 

[BrianKittrell]

These are all great responses so far, and they've helped me get a picture of what I should expect. My want is to create a plausible world without going too far off the deep end with the science while also not getting technobabbly or ridiculous with the describing how the technology works. Some fantasy authors come to mind when thinking about it, and I don't want to be the guy who writes about forging a sword over the next 9 pages/3000 words.

I've found a way to bypass the whole need for Faster Than Light (FTL) travel, but I'm not sharing just yet. And, most of it is very plausible (and some of the tech we may see in the next few decades, but I'm sending it way out into the future for the purposes of this fiction). Extremely fast, but not faster than light. I still reserve the right to use FTL in the story to make things easier/punchier/immediate/imperative/whatever, though. I haven't discounted it yet, and I'll probably go the common route of transdimensional drive, similar to what they use in Star Trek.

I still haven't figured out how Star Wars hyperdrive was supposed to work unless George Lucas said, "Just 'cuz." and it was so.

[Patty Jansen]

I write hard SF and space opera (as well as fantasy, but let's forget about that for the time being). I have been most successful in my hard SF writing (having just sold a story to Analog).

I absolutely dispute the notion that hard SF is full of tech stuff. The only thing that sets apart hard SF from other SF is that the *foundations* of the story are set in real science. If the book is well-written, you won't see these foundations.

You won't see that for my novellette His Name In Lights (which will, incidentally, be free later today) I bought a $150 hardcover scientific book on the results of the Galileo mission on Jupiter's moon Io. But the events that happen in the story are very much shaped by these facts, even though I don't spell them out.

[EthanRussellErway]

Just make sure that you have at least one good warp-core breach.

In all seriousness though, I think the key is believability.  Just say as much as you want or need to without making it unbelievable.  How certain things work can be a mystery, and if you don't really have a good grasp on what you're talking about it's better to keep it a mystery.

Don't fall into the "midi-chlorians" trap either.  George Lucas took something as cool as "the Force" and turned it into something that sounded like a virus in the prequel films.

[Gregory Lynn]

Speaking as a reader of science fiction there is a certain amount of stuff I am willing to accept without explanation.

These would include things like faster than light travel and any kind of reasonable extension of current technology.

You want me to believe that computers have gotten faster and smaller it's not a hard sell. You want me to believe they're sentient you have some spainin' to do.

A lot of what makes science fiction awesome is the difference in the science. If you read Isaac Asimov's stories about Elijah Bailey, one of the things that makes them awesome is the relationship with R. Daneel Olivaw. If you don't know, he's a robot. It's good stuff.

If the difference in the science is part an important part of the story it needs to be explained at the point where it is necessary to advance the story.

[David Adams]

My philosophy when writing Lacuna was simple, so I'll try and stick to dot points. All of the below is my humble opinion...

- I didn't explain anything that didn't need to be explained. I said, "The ship has eight nuclear reactors aboard." I didn't go into a discourse on nuclear fission; nor was it necessary. Most anyone who's interested in science fiction knows fissible material goes in, power comes out. I did explain they generate a lot of heat and heat is bad because a ship in space is a closed system, so if they get too hot they have to be shut down. That's about it.

- I explained things that did need to be explained (restrictions the jump drive had, such as the 200,000 tonne limit, or that even minute amounts of gravity render it inoperable so it has to be used from Lagrange points), but I didn't explain why. I did this because it's just me PIDOOMA (pulling it directly out of my arse). "Oh, that's because the flux field is distorted so that the negative space wedgie can't achieve maximum folding potential and ultra-space collapses into itself in a wave of mancrush for David Dalglish..." etc. I made that previous sentence up off the top of my head and it's just mindless technobabble, which has to be avoided. Instead, all the audience needs (and wants imo) to know is that if you weigh more than 200,000 tonnes it's a no-go.

- When all else failed, I focused on the characters. That's the meat of my story, the main focus... the central show. Exactly how the targeting mechanism of the railguns work shouldn't be in your book, unless it is directly relevant to the story (see above), for example if the evil aliens are using some kind of weakness in the system. At which point, I really do want to hear about how the railguns use a Doppler effect radar to guestimate their target's location, velocity and heading and extrapolate a precise interception point... so that when the aliens show up and the railguns can't hit crap, it's because -- oh no -- the hull material they use is some kind of weird thing that is not subject to the Doppler effect. Otherwise, who gives a crap.

- Chekhov's Gun applies. If you do write about something, that something better be relevant (or revealed later to be a deliberate red herring). If you make a big deal of describing your central character's vivid childhood alien abduction dreams, then they better as hell be important to the story. If your aliens can see thermal heat signatures, you better have your heroes throw flares everywhere to confuse them (or at least have the aliens hunt the heroes in the dark, damnit!). TV Tropes has destroyed my life in this regard, because they trained me to spot Chekhov's Guns. It's an important trope and it applies to sci-fi.

- Speaking personally, use technology to enable your characters to do things they couldn't otherwise do... not as a crutch. If your heroes are surrounded with no way out, your genius engineer shouldn't be like, "Oh if we reverse the polarity on the negative space wedgie beam we can overload their fluid space networks and force them into a state of gigaflux! Their shields will be down and we can blow them up!". I'd like the heroes to triumph because they were clever, or brave, or straight-out ballsy, not "because technobabble". Again, personally, I try to let "rock beats laser" in my sci-fi; I tend to love the idea of the low-tech solution beating the high tech solution, as long as it's not taken to ludicrous extremes.

For example, in Lacuna, a single alien warship shows up and takes on all three of the protagonist ships. And then hands them their arses. It's only when one of the ships, crippled and near destruction, physically rams the aliens (taking itself with them) that the battle is concluded. To me, this is much more satisfying than a negative space beam finding a weakness in their otherwise invulnerable shields, because the visual image of this massive, 200,000 ship smashing side-on to another one and smashing it in half is so much greater than the alien ship just popping because the genius engineer taps a few buttons. Your mileage may vary but that's my opinion.

A counterexample is... I wouldn't have minded so much how the Ewoks in Star Wars VI triumphed over the Empire because they were fighting in their home terrain, in thick jungle where the colossal ranged-weapon advantage of the Stormtroopers was of limited (but still significant) advantage and the Ewoks had the element of surprise. But seriously, once the initial salvos were launched, the Stormtroopers should have regrouped and just laid down absolutely withering barrages of semi-automatic blaster fire (and that AT-ST!) until there were enough Ewok corpses piled around them to use as sandbags. If it were thousands of Ewoks against fifty Stormtroopers I could certainly buy an eventual victory of attrition, especially with the use of gliders and dead-drops and traps they employed, but such an "overwhelming heroic victory" of a stone-age culture against armoured, elite and highly trained special forces with no special tactics, environmental advantages, or brains-beats-brawn such as busting a local dam to drown them all, was straining belief for me. I mean, how did their small-sized rock axes and arrows even penetrate the Stormtrooper armour anyway, and if they could, what was the point of the Stormtroopers wearing it?

Ultimately, there are no rules in sci-fi. Great works, as I illustrated above, have seriously broken any number of the points I gave and there's been plenty of great science fiction that's both followed or broken them (sometimes both!).

For example, Firefly never explained how their FTL worked... or even if it WAS FTL... they just kinda went, "It makes the ship fast." That's all you need to know. Of course, Firefly also had a key scene where Jayne shoots a gun in space... and requires wrapping it in a spacesuit to do so, since he assumes that gunpowder won't ignite in space. In this case it's almost justified in that Jayne is kinda dumb, and the mechanisms of firearms in vacuum are not general knowledge, but none of the crew including Kaylee call him on it. As Cheung, the head of marines in Lacuna goes to some lengths to explain, gunpowder contains its own oxidizer so guns can be fired just fine under water (sometimes they don't cycle properly though and their range is extremely limited) or space, and in fact they work better in some ways in space since although they'll get dirty and jam since the burned powder is much more likely to gum them up and they'll overheat very quickly, there's no air resistance so they won't lose speed and there's no gravity so they won't slowly drop.

In short... again in my opinion... throw in the occasional "fun science fact" but don't go too heavy on the hard stuff and you'll be fine. It's the difference between half a glass of red during a steak dinner and chugging down a whole bottle of Dom Pérignon.

For more information check out Moh's Scale Of Sci-Fi Hardness on TV Tropes.

Edit: The irony that I wrote such a huge post about the need for brevity is not lost on me.

[Patty Jansen]

Huge blocks of blacked-out text are just... weird? Anyone else see this?

[BrianKittrell]

lol! All great advice, and yes, that was a whopper, David, but I read it and enjoyed it. I also look at TV Tropes constantly. It helps both keep me under control and helps me find inspiration sometimes. Spread a little Phlembotinum on that post, and it should be fine.

Huge blocks of blacked-out text are just... weird? Anyone else see this?

Yeah, that's to keep the spoilers from being just out there for casual onlookers.

[Kevis 'The Berserker' Hendrickson]

Huge blocks of blacked-out text are just... weird? Anyone else see this?

What blacked-out text?

[David Adams]

Huge blocks of blacked-out text are just... weird? Anyone else see this?

Your clearance level is clearly insufficient, citizen. You wouldn't be a communist, would you? Only communists would dare try to gain access to classified data.

... that or they're spoiler blocks, designed to block spoilers. You can move your mouse over them to reveal them.

[Phoenix Sullivan]

My SECTOR C is a near-future story that extrapolates today's research into cloning and introduces a pandemic that's prion-based. A lot of the story is a mystery around the pandemic - what it is, where it came from, how it's transmitted - so I did include a lot of what makes the science and disease plausible. Not to the extent Crichton felt the need to include the science background, though, I hope .

Huge blocks of blacked-out text are just... weird? Anyone else see this?

Patty, you create the blackout effect using the "SP" (Spoiler) icon in the formatting buttons.

@David:

[Patty Jansen]

Heh, hadn't even seen that ;-)

OK, freebie is now live.

[Ruby Andrews]

Star Wars seems to work well without much explanation for anything, while Star Trek makes a huge fuss about explaining the technology and science behind everything they encounter. Dune, on the other hand, explains some of the tech and science, but it's mostly about people, story, and faith.

This, in a nutshell, sums up why writing SF is so brilliant: all genres require the reader to suspend some level of disbelief, but you will get a different audience depending on exactly how much disbelief they are prepared to suspend.

I think there are basic conventions, though. For example, as a reader, I would feel cheated by a novel that was set only a few hundred years into the future but which used implausible technology. But I would happily go along with technical impossibilities in a book that was set in a parallel universe, or thousands of years from now.

And I agree that with space opera, you can get away with (almost) anything! 

[haltenny]

I think this is a hard question. To me the whole thing is that this is fiction. Readers are perfectly willing to accept jump drives, trans dimensional drives, warp drives etc, but if you put a virus out there it has to be based on reality? I find it difficult to deal with. You want the reader to be engaged, but as Tabitha King told Stephen once when commenting on one of his characters back story, "You don't have to bore me to death with it." You might explain your technology in a way that is perfectly plausible to you, but not based on fact. It's your technology, you create it, how can it not work?

Having said that, I fear putting my head on the the chopping block with excessive techno babble. One of my characters supplies another character with a blaster. He asks how it works. She says, "I don't know. It fires a blue beam of light and kills things." I don't think I need to explain the power output in watts or gigajoules.

[momilp]

Soft (nutella grade viscosity) and people centered
When the technology becomes the main actor of the story, I normally lose interest. Although, there are stories or situations that require a minimum of explanation.

[RobertLCollins]

I tend to write softer SF. That said, my first goal is to tell a good story. If explaining some of the tech helps the story, fine. If not, I'll just say what the thing is and move on.

The tricky part is that science and technology moves quickly and in unexpected ways. Take my Frigate Victory short stories as an example of this. Most of the stories were written and published 10-15 years ago. One of the "futuristic" gadgets they have are described as "compubooks" or "perscomps." That's because the tablet computer seemed far off, and wasn't easy to name. Now I can see them being called "iPads" (like how Xerox is used for copier) or tab PCs. Heck, they could be the PCs of tomorrow.

The thing about hard SF, as I've always understood it, was that it's been more focused on science than on story. I lost interest in Analog years and years ago because the stories all seemed the same. Only the science was different. I think hard SF has a smaller audience, because of that focus.

That's my two cents. Best of luck with the new story!