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Science-Fiction: How 'real' must a technology be?

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Demos Mirak:
Hello guys, here I am again. This time the question is: 'How 'real' must a technology be?'
Because for the last few days I have been thinking up and discarding various ways for instant (FTL) communication between two points, ranging from quantum entanglement to small traversable wormholes, reading up on them and concluding that they were all impossible. Right now I devised my own way of making things possible, by thinking up a completely new way of going about it. So that issue is no more, but I fear that due to my need to get things right I will encounter similar things later on. So, should I keep trying new things if old things turn out to be impossible, or should I just flip off quantum physics and go my own way?

Wordmaker:
I brought up a similar point for discussion on my blog the other day, on how much scientific knowledge an author needs in order to write sci-fi.

Personally, until a method of FTL travel is actually verified as possible and practical, any kind of FTL is essentially going to be either wrong or border on magic. What I mean is, don't get too hung up on it. Write your story first, and worry about the technology second. If you want to avoid being wrong, use a completely fictional method for space travel and communication. Maybe quantum entanglement is proven to work in your setting, or there's a neighbouring dimension close to ours where the laws of physics are different and people can piggyback communications and space travel on rifts between that dimension and ours.

Galvatron:
In most science fiction there is going to be at least a little hand waving going on.  Thats ok.

I think alot of it depends on what methods or how real you want things to be

Just an example, look at the Battlestar Galactica series (the reboot) they use an FTL drive but never go into great detail on how it works.  You know its there, but they dont tell you how it works or what the science behind it is, and thats ok.  Its just a way to get from A to B, and of cousre when the FTL drive is on the fritz you get added drama.

On another note, if you look at the warhammer 40k universe, traveling through the wrap (and what lives in the warp) is a pretty big deal, and there is a bit more explanation about how it all works.  Of course, the entire system is made up for that setting so making up the details is perfectly ok.

the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
I think what matters most is consistency within your story.

There are excellent and successful SF novels at every level of realism from diamond-hard "this could all be done today" science to wildly speculative. Be clear on what you want to do, and think through the consequences of the bits you are making up; you can get a lot of plausibility out of carefully thinking through the social and economic impact of a made-up technology even if it's a totally implausible one.

I will beg to disagree with Wordmaker on the "story first, technology later" point, because to a large extent, available tech defines the kind of stories you can tell.  Novels written and set in Britain at periods when the fastest ways of getting around were by horseback have different dynamics to ones after the introduction of railways.  Golden age mysteries where determining whether the mysterious returned person is really the baby who went missing decades ago don't work in settings where DNA tests are trivial.  An awful lot of 50s/60s/70s thriller plots totally fail if you set them at a more recent point in time where most people will have cellphones, and so on.  It's certainly worth thinking in terms of what sort of tech setting will best enable the kind of story you want to tell (witness any number of successful military SF/space opera settings where the FTL and related tech have been very carefully contrived to generate battles that feel like Napoleonic-era naval engagements), but I am inclined to think that in general you get more interesting and innovative SF by thinking through the consequences of tech and what new stories they enable.

Wordmaker:
A fair point, but I'd argue that those are really just set-dressings for the overall story.

If the story is "how do we get to our destination in time?" then if your characters travel by horse you use a different obstacle (treacherous countryside and bandits) than you would use if they can travel by rail (the next bridge has been sabotaged). The overall story and goal remains the same. The details are what changes.

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