The Craft of Writing: When I Ignore Science

Writing science fiction – especially hard science fiction, where you're expected to keep to what modern science believes is possible, rather than inventing force fields, lightswords, faster-than-light-drives, or other accoutrements of space opera – is a demanding task. It's not necessarily harder than writing, say, good epic fantasy; they're both equally difficult, in my view, just with different areas of difficulty. It does, however, have external demands that other types of speculative fiction don't really have to worry about.

In my "day job", I sometimes I say I write really hard SF – specifically, I write research proposals in which I tell a government agency (or sometimes private corporation) that the company I work for can solve some problem they have by creating some awesome gadget or process that does not exist… yet. I have to describe – in the most attractive and interesting way – a machine that has yet to be built, using real, known principles of science, engineering, and design approach, and how this machine will address some pressing need for the agency or company.

Of course, in this case I know that my audience is very limited – as few as two or three, generally no more than five to ten – but they will generally be highly aware of the state of the art in the field and at least one or two of them will be sufficiently educated to recognize immediately when I write something that shows I'm trying to BS them, or that I don't know their industry or problem sufficiently. Moreover, the only "story" I have to tell is "how does this machine or process solve your problem?".

It is, in some ways, the ultimate in idea-centered SF: describing the new gadget or approach in sufficient detail to convince your audience to pay large sums of money for it. This also, of cours, heavily restricts what I can write about; not only does it have to be physically possible, it has to also be something that the company I work for can do, and that can reasonably be done at whatever budget I think the target can and will afford for this project.

Regular hard-SF does, at least, broaden my options vastly with respect to what I can use – any scientific or engineering principle that I can get reasonably reputable scientists to agree is possible is open to me. This is where hard-SF is actually somewhat easy: I can say "this is how my characters get from X to Y", and anyone who wants to argue it has to go argue with the scientists, not me. I can get clear, objective answers on what is necessary to design, construct, and produce my literal plot device.

But sometimes – paradoxically – I have to ignore science and technology to produce a good book that happens to be hard-SF.

This is more evident today than it used to be. Before the Computer Revolution and the Information Age began, it didn't seem at all ridiculous to postulate a future in which mankind settled the Solar System with rocket ships, flown by manly men and possibly assisted by room-sized computers (mostly left back on Earth), something like the Apollo program writ large and industrialized. Heinlein's heroes and others used slide rules and paper calculations with abandon, to calculate Hohmann transfer orbits and mass-ratios and other aspects of rocket-related travel.

Today, that kind of thing is simply not happening in the future. The vast majority of space exploration in past decades has been by remote probes – and that seems to be an even more likely condition to be seen in our future, as automation becomes more reliable, drones become more capable, and we continue to prefer to risk non-sentient computers rather than sending fragile sacks of colloidal chemicals like human beings up on top of rather touchy assemblages of explosives and metal.

For Boundary I found an excuse to work around that particular issue; present the world with potential salvage of alien technology and you'll really want human beings, with their full capabilities, onsite. And probably also not want remote devices, whose data streams could be intercepted, be the primary investigators if you think anything militarily important could come out of the research.

But with Boundary – and even more so in the Castaway Planet books – I had to deliberately ignore some other really important projections of science.

The key fact to remember about writing a novel is that you want it to entertain your audience – and unlike my R&D proposals, that audience is thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands. You cannot assume most of them are highly technically educated, and you also cannot assume they want to read through many pages of description and explanation. It's true that there are, sometimes, ways of making such explanations enjoyable enough to read, but they don't always work, and certainly not for all members of your potential readership.

So one key point here is… people prefer to see people as the main characters, and they prefer any jeopardy be something that threatens those characters, not the little remote-controlled robot they run on the far-distant planet they're trying to explore.

That means – put bluntly – that you have to ignore the most likely progression of space exploration, in which machines play a bigger and bigger part and humans are less and less out in space. We're not built for operations in space, and supporting a human being for a journey like those routinely undertaken by probes would require a huge amount of support material – food, environmental support, etc. – which is not needed by the autonomous systems at all.

Note that it's not impossible to try to tell a story set in such a future, but your typical "people visit other planets" setup suddenly becomes far less probable, and you have a challenge in getting people to invest in the operations of remote devices rather than the activities of other human beings on a remote planet.

Even more frequently ignored is the power and capability of automation and computation. Today we're already seeing indications that many jobs are going to be replaced with automation. Unless progress in automation drastically drops for some reason, there's every reason to believe that within 50 years, most jobs will be automated. Anything that doesn't fully require a human decisionmaker (and those are going to become fewer and fewer) will be done by a competent machine. Biological sciences will also advance during that time.

Despite multiple changes in the technologies involved, Moore's Law (the capabilities/speed of a computer double roughly once every 21 months) has continued to hold in a shockingly steady fashion. If this continues for a mere 50 additional years, computers in 50 years will be more than two hundred fifty MILLION times faster than current models. Devices the size of a grain of dust will be more capable than current CPU chips.

I knew this when writing Boundary. I also knew about advances in displays and other areas, to the point that A.J. Baker's "fairy dust" might actually be underestimating the capabilities of technology in 30 years; I did, however, at least give a glimpse as to some of the potential capabilities of such devices.

In Castaway Planet, however, I'm almost completely ignoring progress. Castaway Planet takes place about 200 years from now, a hundred and fifty years after the end of Portal. Yet while the "omnis" used by the Kimei family, with their retinal displays, vast data storage capabilities, and enhanced reality displays, are very impressive by modern standards… they fall ridiculously short of what is likely. I make tasks challenging for our castaways that – in honesty – probably wouldn't take their omnis a moment to figure out for them. Even if we never actually achieve true "artificial intelligence", simple expert system approaches, with a large enough database, would address most problems… and the potential database capability of a device built a hundred or two hundred years from now would be mind-boggling.

I do this, of course, to make sure my humans – the main characters that the readers are supposed to sympathize with and want to follow in the book – have a lot of work to do themselves, rather than relying on the automated omnis to fix everything.

Of course, one can go the other way – take everything to the logical conclusion and basically take human beings out of the picture as being in any way the prime movers of the plot. What you substitute will naturally affect the story you're telling; Charles Stross has touched on this in some of his work.

"Ignoring the facts" can also be more subtle than this. For example, I planned the trip for the Odin and Nebula Storm to Jupiter system based on optimistic assumptions about the Nebula Storm's drive, and also on Jupiter being at a particular point in its orbit (fairly near to Ceres). The latter bit is very important because the distance for a spaceship – even one capable of constant acceleration and thus not having to conform to standard transfer orbit approaches – from one world to another varies DRASTICALLY depending on where in the orbit the target planet is. I didn't define the precise year of departure, so I can sort of handwave around it, but the fact is that in likelihood the Nebula Drive wouldn't produce the accleration I assumed, nor would Jupiter have been in nearly as auspicious a location. It's possible that Nebula Storm might not have been able to catch up with Odin – or that, conversely, Odin might not have been able to keep ahead of Nebula Storm the way it did, and get passed before it ever reached Jupiter. Either case would have removed the grand confrontation at the end.

Even more than this, though, a lot of writers – myself included – don't even try to use our fuzzy, cracked crystal ball predict social change, UNLESS that social change is going to be a major focus of our story. The fact is that it's almost impossible to predict, before the fact, what changes are going to take place in society, just that they're going to make people from, say, 100 years from now be inexpressibly strange from the point of view of people today.

Compare the outlook, knowledge, and behavior of a 20-year-old American man from 1915 with that of an American man of 20 today in 2015; the two both call themselves "Americans" and may even live in a city with the same name, but their social outlooks, their day-to-day experiences, the entertainments they prefer, everything from the way they interact with members of the opposite (or same) sex to the way they handle money will be drastically different, in ways that almost no one in 2015 would have predicted (the Wright Brothers had made their historic flight only 12 years before; World War I ("The Great War") had started the previous year; the Model T had been introduced only seven years previously; and science fiction as we know it today had only just really started to be invented, and Doc Smith wouldn't publish his first epic for another 13 years).

Unless the point of your novel is exploring societal change, in fact, working hard to predict it and then trying to depict it may well work against you as an author… because you'll be asking your audience to work harder just to understand your characters, let alone to empathize with them and their circumstances. When putting your characters into exciting situations that they're supposed to work their way out of, making the reader have to work to grasp what the characters are like will defuse a lot of the tension.

Again, this isn't true if what you're doing is writing a story where the difference in social and personal outlook is the point, but if you're writing typical hard-SF, it's a very important thing to remember. Your reader wants to empathize with/follow the thoughts of the main characters, so it helps – a lot – if those characters are either like the reader, or of some group with which the reader is familiar enough to empathize in a reading context.

This is clear in the Boundary series, and even more so in the Castaway Planet series – and VASTLY so in Grand Central Arena, which takes place three centuries from now in a world where technology has very far advanced from where we are now and created a post-scarcity world (on the other hand, GCA is a grand-scale space opera which shortly takes a turn into the "if that's technology, I could still call it magic" realm). While details of the character backgrounds are significantly different from ones we might be familiar with, the basic reactions, aspirations, and behaviors of the main characters in these books are ones that people from the late 20^th and early 21^st century will recognize and be able to extrapolate from to come to an understanding of what these people are like, and how they are likely to act under various forms of stress.

This allows the reader to help me as an author; if I can get you, as a reader, to invest even a small part of yourself into the character, you make that character richer and stronger for you, the reader. You improve my work for your own experience.

Thus – sometimes – I find it's best to ignore the facts, in order to reach the truth of the story.