invent what you know

writing the science in science fiction

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First, a couple of bits of news to announce:

I am going to be the judge for the MAYDAY Magazine fiction contest. Check out all the details on their contest page. 6,000 words, English language, any fiction genre. Deadline is March 1. There is also a poetry contest to be judged separately.

I did an interview with Ted Conti of the Piled High & Deep podcast. We talked about getting a PhD, why I was a terrible graduate student, writing, reading, science fiction, and many other things.

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One of the things Ted and I talked about in our conversation is how having a science background contributes to writing science fiction. It’s something that I’m asked about fairly often, but I feel like I don’t often have a very satisfying answer. I don’t write books about geology or physics; I don’t generally write books that require a great deal of scientific detail, and when they do I research what I need and make up the rest.

But I’ve been thinking about it a bit more deeply lately, because I do think the real answer is rather more complex than what’s represented by subject matter or story content. I’ve also been thinking a lot about what goes into the stories that we write, and how aware we are of what we’re including, and how to raise that internal awareness in a way that helps us be better people and better writers. 

The first book I finished this year is The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf, a biography of the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. I started the book probably about a year ago, but I put it down at some point during 2020 because it wasn’t holding my focus. It’s not a judgment on the book itself, because when I picked it up again I had no trouble getting into it. It’s quite good, aside from the repeated and tone-deaf explanation that Humboldt “never married” and instead had a lot of “very close male friends” throughout his life. It’s an interesting biography in that it devotes nearly as many pages to Humboldt’s legacy as to his life. Humboldt didn’t earn his place in the history of science with a grand theory or exploration or discovery, but instead for the overarching, lasting influence his way of thinking about the natural world had on his contemporaries and followers.

Humboldt’s big idea, the thing for which he is remembered, is his way of viewing the natural world not as a series of distinct realms that can be considered separately, but as a single, interconnected system, a system that includes every aspect of the natural world as well as our human experience of living in and studying it. The mountains of South America, the flora and fauna unique to locations across the world, the world’s weather and climate, the cultures of indigenous peoples across the world, the global impact of human industrialism, the welling of emotion we feel when we gaze upon a beautiful landscape--all of that is connected, in Humboldt’s view, and to understand one part of it we must try to understand all of it.

It’s a compelling way of looking at the world and our place in it, although in practice there is a bit of tension between this idea and the way science actually works. Scientists can and do encourage communication across areas of expertise, but no one person can be an expert on everything. It’s one thing to recognize and understand that everything is connected, and quite another to actually expand our knowledge of what, exactly, we’re talking about when we talk about everything.

I don’t work as a scientist anymore and haven’t for many years, but I still think about this tension when I’m writing. People ask a lot of if I use my scientific background in my writing. Sometimes I get the impression they want me to point to specific details in my books that came from my scientific background--correctly named rocks, perhaps, because quite a lot of people seem to think that what geologists do is name rocks.

I don’t even blame them for that expectation, because we’ve all read the books in which an author has obviously just discovered environmental science or planetary physics or rocket engineering or disease ecology or evolution (dear lord do a lot of SFF writers very obviously discover evolution) or linguistics or abnormal psychology or whatever, and they are very excited about it, and they want to show off how much they know, and they include a lot of details about it, and those books get labeled as scientifically rigorous sci fi.

Sometimes those books are wonderful, and sometimes they are terrible, and it doesn’t really matter, because there is room in literature for all kinds of books, inspired by all kinds of ideas, and people learning more stuff is never a bad thing. Even if sometimes you can tell just by reading their story what Scientific American or Wikipedia or Atlantic article they read while researching their plot.

A problem arises because some writers take it much, much farther and begin insisting that because they have just learned about environmental science or planetary physics or rocket engineering, then every book needs to deal with those things. That’s when it stops being “research” and starts being an excuse for gatekeeping. And I am not at all a fan of that. Another thing I get asked is whether having a science background makes it harder or less fun to read science fiction, and for that my answer is an unequivocal no. I’m reading fiction, for fuck’s sake, not articles in Nature. I want it to be emotionally compelling above all else. I don’t care how big your rocket science knowledge is if you can’t give me characters and stories I care about.

(Aside: I also think that quite a lot of sci fi aren’t as good at doing both as they think they are--so many rigorous sci fi books have characters that don’t even qualify as paper-thin--but that’s very subjective and I know from reviews/hype/praise that lots of people don’t agree with me.)

When I’m talking to other writers, I never like to hear that they are afraid to write something because they don’t have the scientific knowledge to do it. I know where that fear comes from--the intellectual gatekeepers stroking their rockets can be real assholes--but I always try to do what I can to dispel it. You really, really do not need to have a science background to write sci fi. What you need is a desire to write sci fi. You can learn what you need to make you ideas work, regardless of you background or education.

And, sure, I may chuckle when books contain elements that are scientifically silly, such as splitting entire continents apart with earthquakes (the New Madrid fault zone ain’t gonna do that, y’all) or when melting the polar ice caps results in no land left whatsoever (we do have pretty good estimates of future sea level change, okay), but for the most part I am happy to go along with whatever writers want to do in service of their story, and if the rest of the story is compelling those fumbles rarely detract from my enjoyment.

From a writing perspective, aiming for scientific rigor can be a fun challenge for writers whose minds work that way, and the scientific constraints of certain situations (such as living and traveling in space!) can generate a lot of interesting story elements. I understand the appeal of that, because I’ve done it myself with some of scientific elements in my novels. I have a particular fondness for having to figure out what gravity feels like, or doesn’t, in different non-Earth settings, because gravity is my favorite fundamental force. I also seem to have developed the bad habit of shoving my characters into extremely claustrophobic space-based locations, because apparently I secretly believe that being at the mercy of janky engineering for survival is the real horror.

But that’s not the only way to write, and it’s certainly not the best way to write, because there is no best way to write.

You can learn what you want to learn and make up what you want to make up. We’re writing fiction. We have imaginations. We should embrace what our twisted little brains can do. I earnestly believe that. Have fun with it! Change your fictional world to be as strange and beautiful as you need it to be! Everything else you have available to put into your story--the whole sum of your creativity and experience and perspective--is almost certainly more important than how much time you spend deciding if you need to care about the efficiency of rocket engines.

The answer to whether I use my scientific background in my writing is, obviously, yes, but that’s because I use every part of my life in my writing, sometimes in ways that are easily recognizable and other times in ways that are not. Having a background in physics helps me write books set in space, even if my books aren’t rigorous hard sci fi (something I have little interest in reading or writing). Having a background in geology helps me create believable settings and worlds, even if my books have nothing to do with the science of geology. Having a scientific background that spans disciplines helps me research and incorporate things that fall well outside my areas of expertise. I know what questions to ask, for the most part, and how to ask them, and I know that is not a small thing when it comes to having the confidence to write about something well outside my comfort zone.

My thoughts on this are constantly evolving, but I think that overall what I most want from science fiction, both as a reader and a writer, is a sense of Humboldtian connectivity, an understanding that facts and theories and cool ideas are only a part of a whole, and that whole includes our human interpretations and emotional responses. I want the story to be good, the characters to be appealing, and the experience of reading to be absorbing, all of the usual stuff, and if there are scientific elements, I want them to feel like a natural, fundamental part of the fictional world that includes all of those elements. In terms of writing, this often means very careful revision to not just fact-check and fill plot holes, but to fully wrap the ideas, concepts, and consequences of the scientific ideas into the language, into the structure, and into the human core of the story.

And that is not easy! But if it were easy, it wouldn’t be interesting. The challenge is what makes it a worthwhile literary endeavor. A complex and fully realized science fictional universe isn’t just about how well it stands up to scientific scrutiny, but how well it stands up to our very human emotional engagement with it.