With that attitude, you're doomed to fail. Respect your audience, always. Your generalizations about Americans is beyond arrogance -- it's sneering, look-down-your-nose condescension. You shouldn't be explaining to your audience in any case. Assume they have the intelligence and the knowledge to understand. Truth is, many of them will understand as well as you do, if not better.
Unfortunately, Cogito, I disagree; humbly, arrogantly or otherwise. If you wish to play the devil's advocate, that's your right, but the CBS evening news seems also to disagree with you. My take? You're viewing this country's populace through rose colored glasses. It's in very sad shape. We are defunding education to meet demanded cut backs. We have far too much revere for "the game." It will take decades to reverse this if we started pushing new methods today. The best thing we have going is home schooling via the net. Still, the ones taking advantage of it are too few and far between. Speaking the truth IS respecting my audience. As for arrogance? I have yet to find more than a small handful of people on this Internet that tell me not to be arrogant, who aren't just as arrogant themselves. Nobody is in the right telling me not to teach realism when they preach fabulous at me.
You're missing the point. A country is not a homogenous herd. If you think of your readers as ignant Murikans, you deserve the readers you'll get. Write to intelligent readers, and don't make absurd assumptions about them based on where they come from. That's bigotry, and there are few things more ignorant than that.
I haven't missed any point you've made clearly without attempts to qualify it with insults. If you have to tear someone else down to make your point, your point wasn't very strong to begin with. Anyone can arrogantly degrade an accomplished artist without even looking at their work. Those are usually the ones who flunked out of the course on art appreciation, if not art itself.
I don't assume that people don't know basic science, or more than that. I try to keep my science plausible even with the most speculative ideas, because people will notice "errors". But not everything has to be hyper-realistic. For example, I thought Gravity was an excellent movie and as far as space movies go, a huge step up. And yet not everything in it was realistic, but that was ok with me, it wasn't difficult to look past those things. But yeah, don't assume your readers don't understand anything. If they encounter something in your story they don't quite get, they will surely look it up and it will be a fun learning experience.
Don't get me wrong. T and I become arrogant gits whenever we write anything fight-y, and end up explaining way too much. Then we go back and take it down a notch 'cause even though we both like stories that can teach the reader a thing or two, we're not writing a fight instruction manual. Also, I doubt America is one dumb blob. Lotsa brilliant people, young and old, over there Never underestimate the intelligence of your audience and all that... I don't think it's that simple. If the author is not a rocket scientist, I guess most readers won't hold it against him/her that there're no intricate details of rockets. Of course, if s/he were to write a rocket scientist, s/he would have to create at least a facsimile of the character having that knowledge. I suppose some writers want to tell stories that revolve around their areas of expertise, and that's fine, but readers still enjoy fantasy novels by authors who've never held a real sword in their life. I think both can be done wonderfully, a story with real, hard, thoroughly explained science and a story with more "unexplained" science. If the author has put a lightspeed communication device into her story, I don't expect her to explain to me how it works, I expect her to show me how the characters use it during their adventures, perhaps to solve some problem. Of course, but some of us don't. It's Nutella, it tastes good, who cares what's in it and as long as I don't check how many calories per 100g, it's zero and I won't get fat eating it. What I'm saying is that you can't explain everything, you can't be in the teaching mode all the time, or you can be a sneaky teacher and the reader-students learn without them even noticing it. I love the idea that a sci-fi novel has an educated character who would tell me how the flux-capacitor fluxes, but perhaps not all the time
"Not all the time" is the key, IMO. You are right that America isn't a nation of people punching out store mannequins. On the other hand, there's A LOT, not just in America, of the blind leading the blind. You may realize, nonetheless, that for a vast majority the importance of the game, physical fitness and readying to fight overshadows science and the arts to a dangerous degree. When we hear on the news about some crime being committed in Indianapolis or even in this town, it's rarely pointed out that the perp is a writer or a rocket scientist. My wife is a degreed psychologist. I actually asked her last evening, after reading the trite comments, "Honey? Am I arrogant?" I told her I wouldn't get angry if she said I was, because I truly don't care. Her response came slow and thoughtfully. "YOU have the right to be arrogant. Everything you do is done well." I just get disgusted with the ones who can't find gross imperfections in my work, mostly because they find an excuse not to read it all, so they wont to drag me down instead. I like the fun parts of it all. Joy killers should stop bringing their knives to a gun fight. If the title of the book has "The Universal Manual of Time Travel" as its alternative, wouldn't you expect a lot of descriptions and lectures? There's A LOT more fun and action, IMO. The pooh pooh purveyors are missing the party fun... For example: https://www.writingforums.org/threads/dutch-oven-1999-parody-ramble-on-canticle.129771/
Writers write and readers read for their own individual reasons. In my own case, I could write a story which has a great deal of (potential) human interest, political overtones, economic overtones and who knows what, and that story will never be written because the necessary foundation to lay it all out is simply too ponderous to make it worth reading. The ponderous part is not science at all, but the esoteric world of data processing for a large insurance company. My point is that if a story or novel requires too much explanation or the subject matter is beyond the reader's ability or desire to comprehend, then it's not going to work for them if the crux of the story turns on some esoteric knowledge understood only by particle physicists, for example. On the other hand, I have read books by someone like Greg Bear where the the central idea revolves around biology I don't understand but the story doesn't require that I understand it, just that I accept it, at least for the sake of the story.
Einstein had a quote that went something like "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough" Someone here can correct me if he didn't say that or if I misquoted.
I assume you are referring to Darwin's Children and Darwin's Radio. These are great books. He gives just enough to a moderately savvy reader as concerns the hidden viral code in our genome to make the story work. More interesting to me in those books was the anthropological questions he was able to ask by invoking the "locust" trope, how he played with the very different basic nature of the 'new children', how they interacted, how they socialized, how they saw themselves as individual and gestalt beings. All very intriguing questions he poses to the reader.
Yes, those were the 2 books, and I read one other whose title escapes me at the moment. He knows the importance of the story as well as the science.
The question is explaining simplicity. One person's simplicity is where another person's is and both are merely 2 dimensional representations of something writers attempt to establish; flow.
I'm partial to differential equations myself, so I can relate (linearly) to the second one. It was determinant humor of the first order.
Of course if it becomes plane spiraling of the drain, then we might wish to, velocity-wise, distance r as in m/2[pi]r and causes friction, thus the work dissipates and becomes a real drag. So once the first order arrives, we need to make a second order to wash it down... If the waitress is kind enough to entertain our hard sci-fi, she may wish to join us and also order something to wash down...
See, now that's just not fair, because I don't know if you would be willing to participate in the MathPunDuel I started on the GiantITP forums, and if I re-start the challenge for the crowd on this site, I fear that it would be viewed as excessively derivative.
Of course if it were only partially derivative, we could classify it as Fair Abuse. In fact the idea is strangely attractive enough to have the effect of giving me butterflies in my stomach...
I missed the classic Sci-fi stories like The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, and Journey to the Center of the Earth. I like sci fi stories about characters exploring unknown worlds or inventing stuffs that become a problem. Micheal Crichton also wrote stories that we never forget and it is sad that he passed away. Even Ray Bradbury created novels and short stories with interesting themes. Today I see Hunger Games wannabes and Twilight rip offs. Never once I heard of a new sci fi novel about characters exploring a strange realm, fighting monsters, or solving an invention. I don't care about characters having drama cry baby issues or romantic cheesy moments. Why can't there be new stories like what would happen if humans all become robots, or what if a microscopic world is found inside a scientist's laboratory? We readers get the same crap that doesn't focus on discoveries and human concepts. Even Hollywood is trying to produce the next Hunger Games movie franchise, which I don't give a crap. When will we have a new H.G Wells or a new Ray Bradbury story? I am sick of Star Trek, Star Wars, and teenage drama crap (I still worship Star Wars though. The original movies are better). Let's all make a better sci-fi story that has nothing to do with the concepts that we are sick of. Time to bring back the classics.
@MilesTro What do you think of Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Doctor Who? Have you ever seen those? SciFi-Fantasy has certainly developed a reputation for melodramatic, overblown attempts at EpicSagas™ inflicted by Homer-wannabes that don't know what character development and emotional connection is supposed to look like; but in my opinion, BtVS and Doctor Who are very good at showing what those epic conflicts would look like to the real people trapped in the crossfire. Granted, the lowest points of both shows were spectacular failures that nothing outside of Seefee Channel can match, but the greatest successes of both were even more good than the worst failures were bad, and the failures stand out in the fans' minds so strongly because the successes did such a good job of showing the human side of SF&F.
