My recent review of Aurora was quite critical of Robinson’s writing on several levels, most of which remain legitimate critiques even if you’re not as offput as I was by the book’s fundamentally pessimistic and defeatist thesis. One of these was his use (and misuse) of scientific and technical content. I don’t think I need to reiterate to this audience why it’s eminently reasonably to be critical of such errors while accepting the obvious digressions from reality in fantasy stories and in other science fiction works; instead, this post explores the importance of getting little details right, consideration of the audience in the inclusion of such details, and the role of science in, well, science fiction.
“Getting the little things right” is often emphasized by the same sorts of people who like to invoke “perception is reality,” and I once heard a supposedly inspiring and brilliant leader try to tell me that people walking across the grass to take a shortcut instead of using the sidewalk would lead to satellites falling out of the sky and the cratering of the global economy. No, I’m not making that up. So, when I say it’s important to get the little details right in the science you include in your science fiction, it’s important to be clear that I’m talking about relevant details. If you’re telling a story involving a lot of linguistics, it won’t really matter if you include an erroneous comment about quantum chromodynamics, but it’s exceptionally important to keep your prepositions separate from your participles. I made a big deal about the ship’s computer in Aurora not knowing the origin of the term “delta-V,” which bothered me for several reasons. First, there is a very obvious reason for the term – it comes from the math of the orbital dynamics in which it is involved – which there is little reason to expect would completely vanish or mutate in just a few centuries as depicted in the book’s worldbuilding. It stretches credulity to believe the computer capable of calculating all the maneuvers and astrodynamics involved in the story wouldn’t know this connection, from reference materials if nothing else. Second, though it seems like a minor error, because it is so basic to the field of orbital dynamics, it leads me to question every single future moment in the story which involves orbits, and there are not a few places where maneuvers and orbit changes form key plot elements. Robinson even includes fairly specific numbers for some of these, which I would appreciate…except I have zero confidence he didn’t pull them out of thin air if he doesn’t know why “delta-v” is a term. If I were ambitious and bored, I could run the calculations myself and try to verify his numbers…but I have better things to do.
A few of the older science fiction novels I promote were written by scientists and engineers (or at least passionate amateurs in the relevant fields), and sometimes include appendices of technical information which reads more like a research paper than a novel (Rocheworld stands out as a particular example of this). It’s not necessary to include that much detail and rigor to tell a good hard science fiction story – I suspect most readers skip appendices like that, and trying to include such information in the text can dramatically bog down the story and ruin the narrative – but I believe the audiences for such stories are seeking them out in part because they want to see some level of technical rigor. Including it where it is relevant to the story, and incorporating it in a way that makes it important to the characters and thereby to the reader, is a hallmark of the best hard science fiction. Almost by definition, technical ideas and information form a core factor of hard science fiction stories, which brings us to the role of science in science fiction.
Sometimes, science fiction is Star Trek. Most of the time, Star Trek episodes are character or event driven, and the science serves more as context, worldbuilding, and set dressing. Taken to an extreme, there are stories like Star Wars and Dune, which are essentially fantasy genre stories with science fiction set dressings. Hard science fiction stories, though, tend to be idea stories, and that puts science at the heart of the story. These stories exist to explore the ramification, implications, and follow-on effects of the idea, which is why it’s so important both to include the science, and to make sure you’re getting the science right, in the large and the small details, in those directly relevant to the main idea, and those more tangential (after all, it’s often the second, third, and fourth order effects of the idea which are the most interesting and which add the most depth and interest to the story). This doesn’t always mean a Heavy Planet type story with minimal character or even plot. Asimov’s stories are often hard science fiction built around a central technical idea or ideas, but with a strong narrative core. One of the writers in my writing group is working on a science fiction story which is decidedly character focused, almost literary in its approach, but which qualifies as hard science fiction because of how it revolves around and explores the facets of a central, (mostly) technical idea. It’s one of those rare science fiction pieces which stands on the border between hard and soft science fiction while taking the best of each side of the genre, rather than being torn between the two.
Always, the author’s challenge is presenting an illusion of competency. It can sometimes seem like an author must be conversant in every discipline and field of study in order to write effectively, which is, of course, impossible, and a strong argument in favor of authors being polymaths. Inevitably, we end up faking it, making things up, patching things together from our understanding to make the story work, and we’ll get things wrong, or, perhaps more accurately, not quite right. There will always be a reader out there who is an expert in the exact thing you happen to be writing about, and if you’re not also an expert, there’s a good chance you’ll get something wrong, even with the best beta readers and SME consultations. What keep a story working despite these inevitable errors are internal consistency and getting the right things wrong, meaning things that aren’t tied, even from a distance, to the central plot or character elements. You can get away with a bit more in fantasy, but there’s a spotlight on this kind of accuracy in science fiction, because it has a story role to play. It is called “science” fiction.
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