by: Jan M. Strasser It is a journey when you start writing a science fiction story. You want to make it engaging, but it can be difficult to stay up with science enough to make the story cutting edge yet plausibly project into the future. First, you need to know enough about your subject to discuss intelligently and convincingly, and know when you have enough. Second, you need to understand that nothing is absolute or all known. Third, you need to balance the knowledge with the story. Currently I am working on a tale of a city-state floating on the ocean, called a Seastead. I go slightly forward in time to tell a story of a fully functioning one. I searched on the internet for information on current and projected seasteads. This led to legal obstacles of living in the open ocean; how other countries react to the precursors of seasteads like cruise ships and oil platforms. That led to the rules of the World Trade Association, the prejudice against independent sovereignty and finally rules for lithium transport, a product coveted in today’s world. Each of these searches was taken to answer questions as I developed my plot. Recently, I was offered a chance to join on online seminar on writing about seasteads and was sent a book on the subject. I was very jazzed about really digging in now that I had data from the people actually involved in starting one. The first thing I noticed in the book was the over the top idea that this is a utopia just waiting to happen. If the world would just see the wisdom, all the world’s problems could be solved. People’s opinions are one thing, but when dealing with science nothing is all known or perfect. Everyone knows this, but we continue to see proclamations of finished inquiries or perfection. Science is a bitch and most people have little patience for it, as the steps can be infuriatingly slow. Think of the archaeologist slowly brushing away the ages of dirt and dust off an artifact or bone. You have to go so slow and be so careful to preserve what you are uncovering that you could just scream, or delight in the process. The formal ideas of the scientific method and the null hypothesis are what has allowed us to advance so rapidly in recent history. One of the main ideas - meticulous recording how you set up the experiment and record your results so that someone else can do their own and get the same results - is annoyingly called Reproducibility. Once you do that enough you can START to state what is happening. The null hypothesis pushes you to test the opposite of what you think is happening as diligently as you would if you were testing what you do believe is happening, and see if you can prove that opposing idea. In other words, try to get your own bias out of the process. Did you know that professors used to sit on a dais with a butcher dissecting a corpse on a stage below the lecturer? The professor reading out of a tome, the bible of anatomy, and telling the butcher what to get and where to get it. If the body didn’t have it like the book that meant the body was defective, a mutant, not the book. The experts “knew” what was true and would sit in their chairs spouting it. Needless to say there was much error because nobody actually looked beyond the first foray that was recorded in the book. This we call the arm chair philosophers. Leonardo da Vinci had the gall to dig up bodies and meticulously draw them. The science of anatomy progressed in leaps and bounds when he did that, but it took awhile for anyone to actually look at what he found, after all who does such a thing? Social pressure, the “everyone knows” idea stifles inquiry and discovery. The next problem in research is when do you stop, how much do you put in? You should know your subject. What are seasteads, how do they work? How many have been built or how many are around in your story? However, you don’t need to include a thesis, you use the info to tell the story. The story progresses with this info in the background. You have to put in some details to be clear, but you need to make it natural and flow out of your setting and the actions of your characters. What obstacles you have to overcome to build the seastead? How you deal with countries around you especially ones that may be suspicious of what you are doing or ones that may want to have what you have created? Through these journeys you show the reader what a seastead is, why it is fun or at least interesting and how the characters ride through the story on them.
The idea that the science of anything is “settled” is ridiculous especially in theories; that is why it is a theory. Laws describe what is, not why. The law of gravity has been shown to hold when objects are not moving fast, but breaks down when they move with speeds comparable to the speed of light. You have to be ready for that as more data comes in. To me that’s the joy of science, but nevertheless, humans don’t know everything and have paid dear prices when we arrogantly think we do. So, how do you incorporate this into writing? As I stated before; if someone says everything is solved or will be solved, everything will be great if you do or believe something, watch out! The systems involved on the earth are very complex involving more parts than we are capable of knowing. As our computers progress, more and more of these parts can be included in the picture of how the earth runs and we will solve more and more problems, but we are not omniscient and must always be humble enough to understand that. When do you know you have enough? You won’t until you get the story out on the page, then reread it especially out loud and see how the balance is between facts and story. Put on your reader hat and be critical. Are you getting bored with too much info or are you confused because you don’t understand what is happening or how it happened? To sum up, do research to understand what the science is in the story. Put in enough to justify but not too much to bore. The story must be a mystery in how the conflict will be resolved. Put in enough to justify how it comes out with the understanding other outcomes could have happened. Second, don’t write that you have all the answers, that it “must” be this way. Your character can say it but the narrator must get across that she knows that is not true. Third, be hyper aware of the background and story arc. Science fiction is one genre where you can indulge more in the technical but still tell a compelling story. You must be the judge, at least until you send it out for critique, of how much is acceptable or desired.
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