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McAnally's (The Community Pub) => Author Craft => Topic started by: Demos Mirak on June 11, 2013, 12:30:08 PM
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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?
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I brought up a similar point for discussion on my blog (http://paulanthonyshortt.blogspot.ie/2013/06/open-questions-about-science-fiction.html) 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.
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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.
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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.
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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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I agree with what Neuro is saying, to me, either writing or reading, the most intersting part of science fiction is the impact the tech has on the world/universe and the people in it, not so much how it works.
Also just because something is set in space doesnt mean it has to be super sciencey, just look at Star Wars. Most of the tech in that universe has been around for a long time, its just part of that universe. Heck you even get some magic thrown in. Its not hard or real science fiction by any means, but its awesome =)
So for your example about communication, think of what your setting would be like without FTL communication. To me it brings up images of a pre telegraph western setting, when letters had to be delivered and sending a message and getting a response could take days or weeks or even longer depending on how far that message has to travel.
That has a large effect on things like deploying military forces across a large region, tracking/catching criminals, the way planets communicate with each other.
All of those things change if you have FTL communication, its a minor detail that totaly changes the way tons of things work.
Either of them can be done well, but take some time to think of the effects of your tech choices and what kind of story you want to tell before hand.
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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.
Sort of, but to me its more than that. How people and goods got from A to B changed quite a bit when trains came around. In the American west, having the ability to ride a train across the country made a huge differnce from having to cross in wagons or sail around.
It had an impact on the economy, on the settlers, on the natives, it was a pretty big deal and changed the dynamics in America quite a bit.
Now I agree in a sense that it is dressing, but the dressing is going to have impact on how you build your world, and because of that, I think you should plan it out ahead of time. For example if you want pirates but you are going to use FTL commincation and FTL travel and have a big government in the area, things like pirating become much harder to do.
Also when you are traveling in the vastness of space it becomes a somewhat bigger deal to me than when you are traveling around one planet. Just my two cents
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Absolutely. What I mean is that you can keep your overall story, the concept, the same, regardless of tech level.
Star Wars is about a young farmboy who joins the rebellion against an evil empire, where he discovers his hidden heritage and destiny while saving the rebels from a terrible weapon. The details that make up the story change, but you can put that concept into any setting and it'll still be worth reading.
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Very true, I just think its important to do a bit of planning so you dont end up making it hard to include things you wanted to do because the tech in your setting would make it silly or impossible.
Now as far as Star Wars goes, think about what it would be like if you take away the FTL ability or hyperdrives.
The amount of locations the characters can reach goes way down, infact it would become pretty darn hard for the Rebels to ever get far enough away from the forces of the Empire to be able to stage and equip an army, or even just avoid being killed. And unless you are going to use a worm hole or some other method to cover the emense distance between solar systems you wouldnt be having a Galactic Empire, you'd have a more system based govenrment like the Alliance in FireFly, or the 12 Colonies of Battlestar.
The fewer systems you have in your story the less alien speices you will end up with.
You could take the hyperdrive out of Star Wars and still tell the same story, but the setting would be entirely different, and you might not have any Wookies, and thats a pretty big change over all.
Not saying there is a right/wrong way to do it, just know what you want in your story and make sure you tech supports those things.
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I agree completely. And sometimes, taking your existing idea then taking away a particular piece of technology can give you all kinds of ideas.
I mean, there's enough amazing steampunk Star Wars art out there to make me really want to see that happen!
But this is getting side-tracked from the OP.
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Very very true lol
I think being consitent is as much a factor as any. No one claims Star Wars to be hard science fiction, the tech helps make the setting the story is told in possible and fun and adds a smidge of wonder, though some of that is as much magic as tech. Space is simply the setting.
Now the Forever War is on the other end, much of the story comes from the side effects of traveling the stars, its kind of the key point to the entire story. In this one, space and how its traveled becomes the key plot device.
Each works. But you couldnt bounce back and forth between the two, going from hard to soft and back and forth can really muck up a good science fiction story.
And of cousre there is nothing wrong with Space Fantasy, Warhammer 40k and Star Wars are two of my favorite and as far as my opinion goes, they are both fantasy stories in a space setting.
I do like the idea o taking away a piece of tech in a story, for example, having the Gellar Drive fail mid warp travel in the Warhammer 40k Universe creates all sorts problems for the characters to deal with =)
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I definitely think if I ever dipped my foot into sci-fi (as I hope to do) I'd aim for space opera and space fantasy primarily. My aptitude for science isn't great, and I'd hate to do a disservice to the hard science fiction authors whose steps I'd be following in if I messed it up.
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In the Battletech universe, FTL is handled by using JumpShips, which can "Jump" up to thirty LYs at a time, then have to spend about a week or so recharging the jump drive by using a solar sail. The Jump drive tears a hole in hyperspace and the jumpship goes through the hole to plotted system
If the JumpShip has a LF battery system, it can make two thirty-LYs jumps before recharging. Dravel from the jump points to the planets are handled by DropShips, smaller ships that dock with the JumpShip.
FTL communications are done with Hyper-pulse Generators (HPGs) on each planet. They tear a hole in hyperspace and can send messages up to 50 LYs to the next HPG station. RT point to point communications across hundreds of LYs is possible, but only major interstellar states can afford the cost and not on a regular basis.
There is enough background on the technology to make it plausable without getting too bogged down on detail....
Craig
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Thanks for all the replies, and I'm trying to go for hard science fiction, but since the only science I'm good at is biology, and not physics or mathematics, it will probably end up softer than what I had set out for. But there's no harm in trying.
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Absolutely. What I mean is that you can keep your overall story, the concept, the same, regardless of tech level.
And this is what I am disagreeing with. You can't tell the same shape of thrillers where everyone has cellphones as you can in the 1950s because the plausible dynamics of information flow within the setting are completely different.
On the other hand, Greg Egan has written some stories that only work in the technological milieu he has created for them. "Learning to be Me", for example, is in a setting where people have computerised "jewels" in their heads recording their personalities for backup and potential immortality, and deals with a man who is starting to worry that his jewel has come out of synch with his brain and is not actually recording him after all, but that he'll never be able to prove it.
Star Wars is about a young farmboy who joins the rebellion against an evil empire, where he discovers his hidden heritage and destiny while saving the rebels from a terrible weapon. The details that make up the story change, but you can put that concept into any setting and it'll still be worth reading.
You're going to have a great deal of difficulty making me believe in that story set in an any more than halfway competent panopticon-surveillance dictatorship with tech fifty or a hundred years ahead of our own (the Judge Dredd comicverse, for example) because if you want one person with no special skills to make a difference, or to survive long enough to acquire the skills, you will need some other factors to explain why the surveillance etc hasn't caught these rebels very early on while they are still figuring out how to do their rebel thing.
Not that you can't put the other factors in; just that if you do, it's no longer the same story.
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There is nothing wrong with bio-tech in sci-fi, there is plenty of room for that sort of thing to be worked in.
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So you don't believe that the same basic fantasy story can be told in a high fantasy, western, Victorian or World War 2 setting? Because they've all been done. They just get dressed up differently.
At their core, for example, Star Wars is the same story as Eragon, Pirates of the Caribbean, and the recent Captain America movie. The detail just get changed to suit the setting.
As for thrillers? For sure you can tell the same stories. For one thing, you can take cell phones out of the equation in a number of plausible ways.
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So you don't believe that the same basic fantasy story can be told in a high fantasy, western, Victorian or World War 2 setting? Because they've all been done. They just get dressed up differently.
Maybe we're seeing things on different scales, then, because when you say "dressed up differently", I am seeing different degrees of contrivance within the shape of the world to make the story work.
At their core, for example, Star Wars is the same story as Eragon, Pirates of the Caribbean, and the recent Captain America movie. The detail just get changed to suit the setting.
IIRC, all of those stories have points where they would break if everyone in the story had the same functional communications capacity, relative to the scale of the setting, as having cellphones (or internet access) as default enables.
As for thrillers? For sure you can tell the same stories. For one thing, you can take cell phones out of the equation in a number of plausible ways.
Oh aye, of course you can. But having to do that is to my mind itself making the story a different shape; it is throwing in a factor you don't get for free the same way you do in a pre-industrial setting.
For another example, I can think of maybe two or three examples of fantasy authors who have actually thought through the intersection of a world with fairly common magical healing, and what that does to population growth in a quasi-medieval setting, and the economics of the whole deal.
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We probably are. I'm thinking of story in very broad terms, along the lines of "boy from humble origins discovers secret heritage and becomes a hero."
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How hard the science has to be depends on what kind of story you write. If the rest of the setting is down-to earth gritty pigfarming then you can't very well have FTL-travel without having the mechanics of it worked out. Otherwise it would just be a miracle. On the other hand if it is a larger than life space opera, no need to have it worked out.
The important is that the degree of science you use fit with the setting and the story, and is internally consistent.
/Ulfgeir
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How hard the science has to be depends on what kind of story you write. If the rest of the setting is down-to earth gritty pigfarming then you can't very well have FTL-travel without having the mechanics of it worked out. Otherwise it would just be a miracle.
I'd actually be a little nitpickier here again. In that I am perfectly fine with SF that is doing "here is the One Thing we are making up out of whole cloth. let us work through the interesting consequences and ramifications of that One Thing" in which the specific One Thing itself is essentially a miracle, but the mechanics of everything else are realistic; I think that sort of exploration is one of the things SF does best.
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I would also caution againts worlds were normal things like pig farmers dont exist, unless you have a good reason why no one wants to eat bacon anymore.
Just because man can travel the stars doesnt mean we dont still want a bacon cheese burger.
And I would imagine pig farming could still be a down and dirty job, its always been that way and there is a good chance it always will be. It was gritty and dirty in the bronze age and its still dirty now, putting a man on the moon would have seemed a mircle to the Spartans, not so much a mircale to us, running a pig farm is still a gritty and dirty thing.
Everything doesnt need to change, of course you could come up with new ways to do things, thats up to you, and one of the reasons I enjoy writing science fiction more than any other genre =)
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I'd actually be a little nitpickier here again. In that I am perfectly fine with SF that is doing "here is the One Thing we are making up out of whole cloth. let us work through the interesting consequences and ramifications of that One Thing" in which the specific One Thing itself is essentially a miracle, but the mechanics of everything else are realistic; I think that sort of exploration is one of the things SF does best.
Ok, I give you that. That is of course totally valid, but then that takes a hell of a lot better writing than a lot of authors can do. Or are willing to make the effort.
For example take Star Trek, if you have so you can effectively teleport anyone or anything from anyplace, why then isn't it standard operating procedure for their ships to just beam the whole bridgecrew away from another ship before the combat even happens. Or just beam aboard a really powerful bomb. Especially if you have cloaking capability. The other guys won't know what hit them.
/Ulfgeir
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I would also caution againts worlds were normal things like pig farmers dont exist, unless you have a good reason why no one wants to eat bacon anymore.
Just because man can travel the stars doesnt mean we dont still want a bacon cheese burger.
And I would imagine pig farming could still be a down and dirty job, its always been that way and there is a good chance it always will be. It was gritty and dirty in the bronze age and its still dirty now, putting a man on the moon would have seemed a mircle to the Spartans, not so much a mircale to us, running a pig farm is still a gritty and dirty thing.
That is absolutely true. Maybe I should explain the term pigfarming. On a Swedish rpg-forum, they coined the phrase for settings that basically had very low levels of magic (if any), and that well the high-end stuff you played were maybe one village's cattleraid against another village. Basically the idea that everying back in mediaeval (or other such period) times were damp, grey, and just plain sucked, and that you would die from blood poisoning if you as much as scratched yourself. As opposed to stuff like D&D where you are expected to have a golf-bag of magical weapons and batman's utilitybelt of magical goodies (and if you don't well you won't stand a chance), yet noone reflects on how the abundance of such magic would affect the world.
/Ulfgeir
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I would also caution againts worlds were normal things like pig farmers dont exist, unless you have a good reason why no one wants to eat bacon anymore.
Just because man can travel the stars doesnt mean we dont still want a bacon cheese burger.
Pigs aren't up there with the most efficient ways to generate food on a starship of finite size; even presuming people still wanting meat, I can see poultry, fish or guinea pigs as a sight more efficient.
(In my particular setting, cats are essentially extinct, after a couple of incidents where people realised that carnivores smart enough to track down all the weaknesses in your tightly managed ecosystem but not smart enough to realise why taking advantage of those weaknesses is anti-survival are a Very Bad Idea for starships or space stations. For values of "incidents" with five-figure-plus casualty counts.)
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Ok, I give you that. That is of course totally valid, but then that takes a hell of a lot better writing than a lot of authors can do. Or are willing to make the effort.
Agreed entirely.
For example take Star Trek, if you have so you can effectively teleport anyone or anything from anyplace, why then isn't it standard operating procedure for their ships to just beam the whole bridgecrew away from another ship before the combat even happens. Or just beam aboard a really powerful bomb. Especially if you have cloaking capability. The other guys won't know what hit them.
Indeed. I don't believe I have ever defended Star Trek as good SF and there are reasons for that.
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Pigs aren't up there with the most efficient ways to generate food on a starship of finite size; even presuming people still wanting meat, I can see poultry, fish or guinea pigs as a sight more efficient.
(In my particular setting, cats are essentially extinct, after a couple of incidents where people realised that carnivores smart enough to track down all the weaknesses in your tightly managed ecosystem but not smart enough to realise why taking advantage of those weaknesses is anti-survival are a Very Bad Idea for starships or space stations. For values of "incidents" with five-figure-plus casualty counts.)
Indeed, the only thing is I wasnt just talking about how life on a starship goes, more that there are things going on down on the planets and not just on the ships. Somewhat how firefly does it, lots of ships and all but also lots of people that just live on one world and dont travel around and live a fairly primitive/older life style.
Basiclly saying you can have the starships and space travel, but still have a fairly normal non advanced life on the ground at the same time.
If that makes sense lol
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That is absolutely true. Maybe I should explain the term pigfarming. On a Swedish rpg-forum, they coined the phrase for settings that basically had very low levels of magic (if any), and that well the high-end stuff you played were maybe one village's cattleraid against another village. Basically the idea that everying back in mediaeval (or other such period) times were damp, grey, and just plain sucked, and that you would die from blood poisoning if you as much as scratched yourself. As opposed to stuff like D&D where you are expected to have a golf-bag of magical weapons and batman's utilitybelt of magical goodies (and if you don't well you won't stand a chance), yet noone reflects on how the abundance of such magic would affect the world.
/Ulfgeir
lol got it, please excuse my hill billy ways, I thought you ment the actual farming of pigs
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lol got it, please excuse my hill billy ways, I thought you ment the actual farming of pigs
Heh. The term they used in Swedish was actually "grisodling", which is silly as "odling" is reserved for growing things. Like plants (or maybe as short for "bakterieodling", like you do in petri dishes). I should have explained it better the first time, I forgot that not everyone had the same reference-point I had. =^_^=
/Ulfgeir
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Indeed, the only thing is I wasnt just talking about how life on a starship goes, more that there are things going on down on the planets and not just on the ships.
But anything with humans on a non-Earth planet has to have been brought there on a starship in the first place, no ?
Somewhat how firefly does it, lots of ships and all but also lots of people that just live on one world and dont travel around and live a fairly primitive/older life style.
In most settings, that would be a plausibility-killer for me. In Firefly, complaining about that being a plausibility-killer is like compaining that you can;t scratch your itchy nose because someone just chopped both your arms off.
Basiclly saying you can have the starships and space travel, but still have a fairly normal non advanced life on the ground at the same time.
"Normal" is exactly the point I am quibbling with; you want to make another planet's setting look a lot like here and now, you need to have solid active reasons to convince me.
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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.
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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.
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.)
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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.
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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.
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
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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.
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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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.
Depends on whether the story you want to tell needs someone who plausibly knows that stuff or not; if you're writing a competent professional in their field, or a reasonably educated person within the context of the setting, for example.
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.
Telling for the sake of telling is a character-building technique, though.
Imagine a first-person narrative being written by an explorer on a new planet. She has an in-universe audience in mind, the people back home who are going to be reading her report. The stuff she explains to them - the stuff she needs to explain to them - is a very powerful tool for characterising her, for characterising them, and for establishing what the setting's details are like - particularly in terms of what's obvious to her and her in-world audience but not to the real-world reader, and vice versa. ("These people call this stuff coffee but it's flat and bitter, and worst of all, they serve it hot.")
There are some amazing (and successful) novels doing clever things with this kind of thing - Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos books and Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, for example.
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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.
I think that probably the best way to think about it is from the character’s point of view. For example, most people use cell phones and TVs without understand the fascinating physics that makes them work.
If your main characters are developing, or working closely with, the technology then you are going to have to be very good with your physics. No one likes to find out that your Heisenberg-Raazkove innovation that allows for teleportation doesn't even have the Heisenberg side of the technology right. -- On the other hand, your characters don't have to know how it works to know that they operate the device in some way and get something cool to happen. They probably don't even care (and perhaps the reader as well) which, if any of the particles involved are violating Einstein’s relativity because of Heisenberg uncertainty. New knowledge only available in your book doesn't have to exist now, with current limited understanding of the universe. And a lot of people might not care how exactly they've overcome current understanding (or even what current understanding is).
So if you have to discuss science, make sure you get it right. But you don’t have to discuss science to write a good science-fiction.
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Depends on whether the story you want to tell needs someone who plausibly knows that stuff or not; if you're writing a competent professional in their field, or a reasonably educated person within the context of the setting, for example.
Telling for the sake of telling is a character-building technique, though.
Imagine a first-person narrative being written by an explorer on a new planet. She has an in-universe audience in mind, the people back home who are going to be reading her report. The stuff she explains to them - the stuff she needs to explain to them - is a very powerful tool for characterising her, for characterising them, and for establishing what the setting's details are like - particularly in terms of what's obvious to her and her in-world audience but not to the real-world reader, and vice versa. ("These people call this stuff coffee but it's flat and bitter, and worst of all, they serve it hot.")
There are some amazing (and successful) novels doing clever things with this kind of thing - Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos books and Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, for example.
I agree, but the trouble I see, or more the thing that really grinds my gears are when the obersvations dont fit the character.
Say the character is not educated, maybe instead of a scientist its a gunslinger, the types of obersvations the charcter would be related to an in universe audience should be different.
When the character should be looking for possible ambush points, but is instead telling me about the history of an ancient alien race or talking about how a ships FTL drive works (unless the character has been shown to have an undestanding of this type of thing) comes off as more of an info dump.
So I suppose what I am getting at is whats be related to me as the reader should make sense from the point of view I am getting it from, and it makes no sense that the on screne character would know or notice a certain thing Id rather find out about that information later and in a way that fits the narritive better.
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I agree, but the trouble I see, or more the thing that really grinds my gears are when the obersvations dont fit the character.
Say the character is not educated, maybe instead of a scientist its a gunslinger, the types of obersvations the charcter would be related to an in universe audience should be different.
When the character should be looking for possible ambush points, but is instead telling me about the history of an ancient alien race or talking about how a ships FTL drive works (unless the character has been shown to have an undestanding of this type of thing) comes off as more of an info dump.
So I suppose what I am getting at is whats be related to me as the reader should make sense from the point of view I am getting it from, and it makes no sense that the on screne character would know or notice a certain thing Id rather find out about that information later and in a way that fits the narritive better.
No argument with any of that.
I think the way it can sometimes fail for even good writers is "I absolutely need the reader to know bit of world-mechanic X in order for the events of chapter 25 to make sense, because readers not understanding what's going on is bad, and I am going to shove it into a quiet moment in chapter 10 because i can't find a better place for it."
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Telling for the sake of telling is a character-building technique, though.
Telling anything for the sake of telling is going to feel like you couldn't find a way to make it fit naturally into the story. Just like you shouldn't introduce a character then spend a paragraph describing their entire appearance in detail, you don't want to blow all your setting detail in one go.
Imagine a first-person narrative being written by an explorer on a new planet. She has an in-universe audience in mind, the people back home who are going to be reading her report. The stuff she explains to them - the stuff she needs to explain to them - is a very powerful tool for characterising her, for characterising them, and for establishing what the setting's details are like - particularly in terms of what's obvious to her and her in-world audience but not to the real-world reader, and vice versa. ("These people call this stuff coffee but it's flat and bitter, and worst of all, they serve it hot.")
Perfect! Right there is a character who is likely to be thinking about the specifics of FTL and the technology at her disposal compared to the world she's exploring. That's exactly the kind of thing you want to use if you want to make technology details a major part of your book.
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I don't think things necessarily have to be explained. I've been reading a lot of Elizabeth Moon recently, so I'll use her as an example. In her Vatta's War series, the mechanics of FTL are never even hinted at. They aren't the story, and have nothing to do with setting or character development-it's enough that it exists. Communication is the story. The 'how' for that isn't explained either. The story rests in the chaos of disrupted communication. And it works.
In Heinlein's 'Time for the Stars', I don't think the technology is ever explained either. But the time dilation from traveling at relativistic speeds, and those effects IS, because that is actually plot relevant. The engineering is not.
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.)
Don't forget fencing and other martial arts.
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.)
If you're writing from those perspectives and delving into their professional knowledge, I suspect you're probably limiting your potential audience just a tad. :P That would be a hard book to pull off.
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If you're writing from those perspectives and delving into their professional knowledge, I suspect you're probably limiting your potential audience just a tad. :P
Well, granted that there's no choice a writer can make that won't appeal to some readers and turn others off, I don't actually think so; lots of people read to enjoy getting inside the head of people with different competences than the reader has and have it make sense to them, Or at least to get a plausible illusion of that, be it as well backed with solid geekiness as Neal Stephenson or as superficial as Dan Brown.
That would be a hard book to pull off.
And yet people who do that sort of thing make bestseller lists.
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And yet people who do that sort of thing make bestseller lists.
Because the people who can do that sort of thing and still make it accessible to a broad audience are really, really good at what they do! ;)
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Because the people who can do that sort of thing and still make it accessible to a broad audience are really, really good at what they do! ;)
Granted, but what would be the point in aiming to be less than really really good ?
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Find the style that suits you best. If it happens to be similar to another author, that's fine. But don't get hung up on emulating the ones who've made it to the big time. It's your voice readers will want to hear, with engaging characters and a captivating story. Everything else is gravy.
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Granted, but what would be the point in aiming to be less than really really good ?
I had an engineering prof who was fond of saying 'perfect is the enemy of 'good enough'.
...But I'm still a perfectionist.
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How much science needs to be in your sci-fi depends on YOU.
What "type" of sci-fi do you want to write? What are you ok with being known for? If you want to be known as a "hard sci-fi" writer, you HAVE to do the thinking legwork. Because if you don't, and you still try to call yourself hard sci-fi, someone with multiple degrees in those science will point out your writing doesn't fly and contains errors. There are people out there that are bent out of shape by logic holes in the new Star Trek films, and Star Trek isn't really hard sci-fi. Being credible in your logic is the bread and butter of some disciplines, and people learned in those disciplines WILL call you out on bullshit if you portray yourself as writing hard sci-fi.
On the other hand, if you never claim to be writing hard sci-fi, then you can get away with more. I would say...think of your favorite sci-fi authors. If someone told you you wrote like them, would you be happy? If so, see what they do in terms of believably and how much science is actually shown, and go from there. I'm a fan of Anne McCaffrey, but she has logic and science holes like whoa. So I aim to do better on the consistency and science front, while still trying to be engaging on the idea and character fronts, like she was.
Also...I'm somewhat on the side of not minding technical explanations of things in stories, if they are not over long, are grounded in real world science, and interesting. I *like* being taught in my books, and I think we've lost something by pushing "oh, people don't like details, explanations, or science!" at this generation of writers. Sure, it takes skill to pull it off...but I genuinely think not any more skill than it takes to write a good story. Then again, I set the standard for "good story" high, and feel by the time you're telling a good story, you should already have the skills to put a bit of science in the story without disrupting it.