I'm at a sort of impasse of how much detail I should put into science fiction as far as conceptually, or even in relation to the physics and calculus. Does it matter? Does it add to, or take away from the general story in a whole. I find some of the concepts I like to write about have a fair amount of background physics, chemistry, or geology information that should probably be prior knowledge for the reader. Unfortunately, some of these concepts just need to explained, but how much should I explain, and how much can I leave to the reader to try and infer. Or just leave out entirely. I understand I don't want to bore the reader (although a fair amount of actual science in writing actually excites me more), but where is the line drawn from necessity, to conceptual impossibility within a novel. I apologize for the broad question, but I find myself getting long-winded at times when technical aspects are involved. It's the curse of being a field service engineer.
I like to recommend this book because I feel like it's a master class on hard science fiction. She puts a ton of work into explaining the science but it isn't boring or overdone. In my opinion, if you are writing in a hard science fiction genre, you want to follow the same rules as any other info-dumping. Explain the minimum you can at the latest possible time you can artistically get away with it. If you are writing to a crowd that is used to some tropes, you probably don't need to explain everything that's been explained over and over in other science fiction, like artificial gravity from rotation or acceleration, other than to say what's happening in a conversational way. imo
Thank you for the book suggestion. So you're saying that general concepts that are common to most science fiction can just be inferred, while more difficult concepts can be casually explained. Seems fairly workable for a lot of situations. Could be difficult for some things to be made casual though. Need to work on not info dumping for sure. Thank you for the suggestions.
They don't explain warp drive in Star Trek at all but everybody accepts it. And the fact that they need Dilithium crystals for it to work. It doesn't work...need to find some dilithium crystals.
I think you should just do your stuff without explaining the background. Explain how your technology may extend from equations like general relativity, but not what general relativity is. The casual reader doesn't care, to them it's just a high-tech magic warp drive, to those of us with science backgrounds, we already know the basics.
The worst aspect of explaining details of your science or technology is the bright techies will pounce on the aspects that violate the latest theories. And believe me, the nerds who want to show off their "techspertise" WILL be reading your work, and WILL be on you like a Doberman on a raw steak. Just give enough to hint at how the tech behaves. Even so, you'll still hear from the hypernerds.
Thanks for the advice guys. I'll try to find a healthy balance without subjecting myself to the harsh ridicule of the super nerds...although I'm pretty sure my work is starting to turn me into them. What I'm getting from you guys is enough for story progression and character development, but not so much as to put myself in a tight spot technically, or become burdening. Sounds like clever writing can alleviate over-explanation if done right. Sounds like a good challenge.
I was just ranting about discussing this earlier elsewhere, and I think that for most people there's an "uncanny valley" phenomenon going on. I'm fine with lightsabers and gravity generators in context, but when someone starts to go on about genetically modified (thanks for the example @Wreybies) people noodling about at near-absolute zero in a vacuum, I'm out. Tell me that these critters evolved on the surface of Pluto and leave it, okay. Pretty damn unlikely according to what we know now, but tell me that you gave someone an injection that modified their DNA to deal with it? Nope.
I shamelessly hand-wave science when I need to but like to keep stuff plausible. My recommendation would be to do whatever you want to do, but just make sure it’s entertaining to the audience you want. Some people love hard scifi, some don’t. Though if you put enough hard scifi in there to turn your audience into a hard scifi audience, they won’t tolerate innacuracies, so my recommendation would be to either do hard scifi or don’t do it.
I agree for the most part. I think we all agree that the universe is governed by knowable forces that can be described by math, and that a lot of things could happen that we don't see every day. If your science fiction has a laser sword, whatever. It's "high-tech." But when the writer says, "this crystal refracts the plasma beam into a fourth dimensional square, the edge of which is the blade," or when the monster "is evolving," I can't hang.
I think the biggest mistake most sci-fi writers make is assuming that because science doesn’t know something that it knows nothing about it. Dark matter is a great example, and lots of sci-fi authors use it. We have no idea what it is, but we have a very very long list of what it is not.
I think most times it's about knowing what the reader knows and using that. But you need to know both techie and non-techie readers. H.G. Wells did so well in The War of the Worlds: most readers knew nothing about machines from Mars, and when he went into alien world-building, his simile usage was based on reader experience in his own world: glistening like wet leather... etc. So most times it's not the sci-fi detail, but how a reader can relate to and process that detail to understand it. Most times that's a balance of generally known fact and that... hell, yeah -- that could work added extra you give it! E.g., most readers (whether techies or not) know about lightspeed: they know it's impossible to travel at lightspeed to get to other planets, but (and as said above) Star Trek added that lovely 'warp drive' jump that allows the reader to go: oh, yeah, I see how it could work. It satisfies both the techie and the layman because you take something known (a fact you can't travel at lightspeed) and schema refresh it (add a 'warp drive'), and give it's own 'twist' to make it believable. Why is it believable to both side of the techie/not-techie reader? Most readers know you need petrol to run a car, and it's not a hard leap to understand that a star ship's warp drive then needs crystals to power it. But after that, not every reader who owns a car cares to know how petrol gets that car moving, just that it gets it moving: no more detail needed for the layman. But you don't need to expand either for the techie reader. Warp drive... crystal... that instantly engages the techie mind and allows them to interact with the sci-fi and explore the 'why' all by themselves. They don't need the detail either. But both sides have that: yeah, that 'could possibly work' interaction, based on their knowledge.
Multiple pages sounds a bit much.Try to break the exposition up into small chunks that come up when they're relevant For example, maybe someone gives him a joking warning about a sewer monster crawling out of the toilet before he goes to the restroom. That can establish that "there's something odd about the plumbing" as a fact of the setting. More chunks of information can be added when the characters have a reason to be thinking about the sewer system. Another question is, does it matter to the characters or the story? In a modern-day novel, relatively few people who use a car will know all the details of the internal combustion engine. And even if they do, the author probably won't be providing a lecture on how the engine is operating. It'll just be "He started up the car and drove to work." Of course, there might be an exception if there's something unusual about the car, the characters have a reason to be thinking about this process in detail ("but this mechanical fault means he couldn't have used the car, so his alibi for the murder is false!")or the precise details matter for the story (say, there's a bomb under the car set to go off when the engine starts up). And the same will be true for the super-tech in a sci-fi story. If the purpose of a warp drive is just "the characters need to travel to Fomalhaut to chase down a fugitive", and all the stuff relevant to the plot happens after they arrive, then detailing the workings won't add much to the story. But if a scene ("we can't hit warp until we're out of the gravity well, but the navy will catch us before then!") will depend on or be enhanced by the science (imaginary, soft or hard) of how it works, then you'll want to establish those rules early. It doesn't all need to be strictly relevant of course--a bit of set dressing woven into the story can set the scene, and establish that the characters are somewhere different and wondrous to us.
Whole episodes of Star Trek were based on finding more dilithium crystals but I never asked how they worked. There was one where the engines were shut down by a lunatic and they needed to get going in a hurry. Scotty said, "I can't break the laws of physics, I have to have 20 minutes". I didn't question why 20 minutes was needed or why it conformed to the laws of physics. I also didn't know what Scotty was doing in this tube like structure that eventually got everything working again. But it all worked in my imagination.
The Naked Time. The "law of physics" was that if you try to feed matter and antimatter streams into the reactor below a certain temperature, the reaction would "imlode" the engines, and the components required 20 minutes to rea ch that threshold temperature. Strictly speaking, that's an engineering limitation, but still a hard formula.
You did, however, know with certainty that reversing the polarity on the probe was the solution. I read a lot of hard science fiction, and am generally a technical person myself, so I tend to wallow in technical aspects of stories (much to the chagrin of people trying to edit my work, it seems). The novel referenced above, Autonomous, is an excellent adventure story, and Newitz does a great job keeping the science at bay while holding it out there for her more technically-minded readers, me included. If you are looking for space-based hard sci-fi to reference, where the technical aspects are well-written, with a significant dose of handwavium (the most critical element in any sci-fi story) but no shark jumping, read Greg Bear, Kim Stanley Robinson, James S.A. Corey, Alastair Reynolds, and Andy Weir. There are others, for sure. The key, I think, is to ensure that the plot works without the technology. Does your elevator pitch hang together, where you don't have the time to explain how the dilithium crystals work or why the fusion generator finally worked after all those decades of being within a decade of the discovery? If your answer is "yes", you've got something; if not, well...
When writing any type of fiction our target audience should be always kept in mind. For example, children of different ages have different comprehension abilities and so the vocabulary that the writer uses must be taken into serious consideration. Otherwise we are targeting the wrong group. The same applies to all other target audiences. Are we targeting the highly intellectual reader who enjoys intricate scientific explanations? Or is our intended audience one which doesn't care or is actually averse to such an approach and views it as an unnecessary distraction from the story’s theme? ' Another aspect is necessity. How necessary is a detailed explanation? Is it essential to the understanding of the story? Will the reader feel confused if an explanation isn't included? For example, in the short story: “I have no Mouth But I must Scream!” we are not provided with the technical intricacies of how the Computer, who has enslaved a group of humans after an apocalyptic disaster it inflicted on humanity, functions. Instead, the focus is on their enslaved condition and the problem of how to escape their agonizing captivity. Any attempt a a meticulously detailed explanation would slow down the story’s pace and reduce the drama. In short, the writer runs the risk of distracting the reader by doing so. Is it to tell a fascinating story that entertains, or is it to show the reader how intellectually sophisticated he is? If a reader begins wondering why the writer is choosing to interrupt the story’s flow, then the writer will defeat the story's main purpose which is to entertain. On the other hand, if complex technology is constantly displayed without any reference to how it it works, then that also can be distracting. For example, if we describe a hand-held weapon that uses sonic waves to disable or even kill, we will need to explain how those vibrations aren’t transmitted to the hand that is holding the weapon. It need not be detailed, but a brief and casual reference to a sonic dampener might do the trick. Have it malfunction and injure the user and mention why. The reader will assume that the problem was dealt with effectively and keep reading. But again there are a minority of readers who do demand a detailed explanation and are hard science fiction fans of writers such as the late Isaac Asimov who excelled in that area. Another factor is length. If we are writing a novel, then of course we can afford to use several hundred words in detailed technological descriptions. But if we are writing Flash Fiction, or a regular short story, then we will not enjoy that luxury since word limits might strictly apply. Not always though, there are exceptions. If we can work in an explanation in some dramatic way that seamlessly merges with the rest of the story or can make it essential to it-then we are OK. Overall the primary thing is not to annoy or disinterest the reader with unnecessaries. So that is my take on the subject.
