McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
Science-Fiction: How 'real' must a technology be?
Wordmaker:
A lot of it comes down to what will be important to the story.
Say you want to tell a sci-fi story about a non-Earth world that has humans on it. The story will never feature characters leaving the planet. Therefore while the writer might want to know, for themselves, how they got there, it doesn't really matter to the story, so you can write the whole book without ever mentioning how they humans ended up there, just like a book set on modern-day Earth doesn't need to describe how humans evolved over millions of years.
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Wordmaker on June 12, 2013, 02:57:31 PM ---Say you want to tell a sci-fi story about a non-Earth world that has humans on it. The story will never feature characters leaving the planet. Therefore while the writer might want to know, for themselves, how they got there, it doesn't really matter to the story, so you can write the whole book without ever mentioning how they humans ended up there, just like a book set on modern-day Earth doesn't need to describe how humans evolved over millions of years.
--- End quote ---
I think that all other things being equal, there should be enough in the book - not necessarily spelled out in detail, but clues enough to make it hold together - to keep it plausible for as many people as possible. Unless you're telling a story in a particular mode where realism is not expected (such as a fairy-tale retelling), it will make for a book that breaks suspension of disbelief for fewer people to have the biology work, the physics work, the linguistics and economics work, &c. Even if none of those affect the story directly, they create the setting in which the story unfolds and the fewer readers who are thrown out of the story by "X you say here would imply Y and Z which would interfere with W happening as you describe it" the better.
Granted, one can't do infinite research and the story has to get written at some point if it's to exist at all. (To a first approximation, so far as I'm concerned, that means never write about guns, horses, or sailing ships; those appear to be the killer topics where no matter how much research you do you will always find readers who know as much or more, disagree with you about technical details and will be vocal online about it.)
Wordmaker:
Absolutely, you want to alienate as few readers as possible. The danger though, is that a lot of Sci-Fi has this tendency to go into unnecessary detail about how technology works, with character discussing or thinking about advances in a way that real people just never do.
There was a short story written, and I can't for the life of me find it, where the writer describes two people in a modern setting going on a plane journey. It's funny to read, because ordinary people don't think about the aerodynamic properties of air travel, or how amazing it is that a network of satellites in orbit around the planet allows for instant communication through handheld devices, even when traveling through the sky.
So if you write a book, say a noir detective story set on a human colony, it's going to be difficult to slip in a scene where your detective thinks about how the colony was founded by a liveship that travelled for thirty years on a one-way trip from Earth, or that it's fortunate that scientists managed to figure out a way to stabilize wormholes for interstellar travel. You run the risk of taking the reader out of the story, breaking the flow in a very recognizable way to explain the setting to the reader. If the detective is investigating the death of someone related to the man who developed the technology allowing the colony to be founded, then you have a perfect way to introduce that information, but not every story needs that.
Galvatron:
--- Quote from: Wordmaker on June 12, 2013, 03:42:39 PM ---Absolutely, you want to alienate as few readers as possible. The danger though, is that a lot of Sci-Fi has this tendency to go into unnecessary detail about how technology works, with character discussing or thinking about advances in a way that real people just never do.
There was a short story written, and I can't for the life of me find it, where the writer describes two people in a modern setting going on a plane journey. It's funny to read, because ordinary people don't think about the aerodynamic properties of air travel, or how amazing it is that a network of satellites in orbit around the planet allows for instant communication through handheld devices, even when traveling through the sky.
So if you write a book, say a noir detective story set on a human colony, it's going to be difficult to slip in a scene where your detective thinks about how the colony was founded by a liveship that travelled for thirty years on a one-way trip from Earth, or that it's fortunate that scientists managed to figure out a way to stabilize wormholes for interstellar travel. You run the risk of taking the reader out of the story, breaking the flow in a very recognizable way to explain the setting to the reader. If the detective is investigating the death of someone related to the man who developed the technology allowing the colony to be founded, then you have a perfect way to introduce that information, but not every story needs that.
--- End quote ---
This is a good point, Im not a fan of having a character go into info dump mode, and there are a lot of characters in a sci fi setting that probably are not going to know the mechanics of FTL drives / space ships/ worm holes/ the history of the galaxy.
Some people will know it, but even if the character is a scientist, have them just spit out info for the sake of telling me is annoying. Of course thats just my taste, but id rather have it worked into the story in a meaningful way
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Wordmaker on June 12, 2013, 03:42:39 PM ---Absolutely, you want to alienate as few readers as possible. The danger though, is that a lot of Sci-Fi has this tendency to go into unnecessary detail about how technology works, with character discussing or thinking about advances in a way that real people just never do.
--- End quote ---
Depends on the real people. You write from the POV of a scientist or an engineer or a programmer working with a problem in their field of expertise, thinking about the technical details is pretty much true to life. (Speaking as a scientist and programmer myself.)
The trick is getting it to work. Unless you're Neal Stephenson or Douglas Adams, straight infodumps are way hard to make fun to read in and of themselves; but I think genre SF and fantasy is notably highly populated with people from setting X turning up in setting Y, or young-adult protagonists just leaving their village and getting to learn how the world works, at least in part because people to whom something can legitimately in-character be explained are immensely useful and are worth having.
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