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should science fiction be based on science fact (6 posts)

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Aaron said 10 months ago:

What do you think? I enjoy doing some research on “photons” or packets of light energy before writing it into my story.

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Matthew G. Lawson said 10 months ago:

I was going to post something like this myself, I will do research mainly just to find how plausible something would be. My writings are not science technological heavy. I don’t like writing block paragraphs of how something works and I don’t like reading it. I love Frank Herbert and Robert Heinlen, but I get bored in some of the sciene heavy sections.

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Jeremy Reimer said 10 months ago:

I come from a physics background, so I really like to have some scientifically-accurate elements in my story, but I don’t want the story to get bogged down with dry descriptions of how things work, so I will throw in a term or a theory in there occasionally but not bother to explain it. There are also times when I simply want something to work despite it being implausible in what we currently know as reality (hyperspace is probably the best example here). For those times I don’t bother trying to make up a lot of Star Trek-like “technobabble”, but simply assume that it works, and everyone knows it works, so nobody bothers talking that much about it.

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J. Cameron McClain said 10 months ago:

“Hard” SF seems to demand rigor in explaining the science–otherwise you get into Fantasy territory. That being said, trying to define the parameters of any genre is difficult at best. Is Star Trek SF or Fantasy? Star Wars?

But yeah, interesting question for those writing specifically to those genres. I’m a “Speculative Fiction” leaning person. If it’s beyond the mundane, and fiction, it’s Spec-fic. I write in too many “genres” to get bogged down in only one, and it seems that most SF-Fantasy-Horror writers tend to bleed over the edges at some point.

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Jeremy Reimer said 10 months ago:

I would classify the original Star Wars movies as “science fantasy” because of the setting (“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”) and the use of the magical “Force” that exists without a scientific explanation. Of course Lucas ruined this in the prequels by bringing in “Midichlorians” to explain the Force without really explaining it.

Star Trek seems skewed more heavily towards the science in science fiction–they will always overly explain things, sometimes to the detriment of the story. I love Star Trek (although Voyager and Enterprise fell off sharply in terms of story quality) but I understand and accept its flaws.

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Aaron said 9 months, 4 weeks ago:

I agree with the “science fantasy” label for starwars. So far as adding paragraphs describing science fact, I like to have characters provide it in conversation. Often times I also add a humorous undertone. You see a little bit of that in my Lokians series.

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