SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

Whether you've written science fiction or are just interested in reading or watching it, I'm interested in hearing people's thoughts on the importance of fictional technology in sci-fi stories. Is it one of the principles draws of the genre for you or is it just an embellishment? Do you notice (or care) if the technology depicted doesn't really make sense or is inconsistently applied? If you're a science fiction author, how much time and thought did you put into the fictional science in your story/stories?

I've written a blog post with my own thoughts on the topic and I'd like to hear what people think. Here's the post.

You don't always need to have fictional technology in SF, though many stories have it. Just for example, Andy Weir's The Martian had nothing but technology that already exists (though the machines that used it to get his protagonists to and from Mars haven't been built yet). Point is, they could be built without any great scientific breakthrough.
On the other hand, many SF authors (myself included) have to come up with some way to overcome the limitations of existing technology. Star travel is a classic example -- if you limit yourself to the speed of light, you'd need to put your protagonists to sleep for a few decades to get to even the nearest stars (and that itself would involve technology that doesn't now exist).
I think it is important for an author to provide at least some explanation for any invented technology -- something that at least lets the reader know that there is some imagined scientific basis for the technology i.e. that it isn't just "magic" which would put the story into the realm of fantasy.
In addition, just because some invented technology lets you violate one law of present-day science, readers will expect that other scientific principles (as known today) will still be observed.
In other words, I have found that SF readers take the science part seriously... :-)

John wrote: "In other words, I have found that SF readers take the science part seriously... :-)"

That's good to know. I actually really enjoy getting into the details of the science as well as the fiction whilst I'm writing, and I appreciate the same in other SF stories.

Also... I think it was either Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke who said that an SF writer was allowed to have only ONE unexplained scientific "miracle" per story. :-)

One of the things that William Gibson does is to assume the new tech into the story world. The tech is just part of the characters' lives and they don't comment on it. That way, it needs no explanation at all because it already exists. I think that if a storyteller proceeds with that assumption, they can do anything.

It really depends on the kind of story you're telling and what the tech is supposed to accomplish. And of course the inclusion of fantasy level SF tech can be handled poorly or effectively.

In a lot of SF the technology isn't the point, but is actually just there as an enabling literary device that allows the "what if" of the story to exist at all.

As John mentions in message 2, if you put technological limits in your story, then there are story consequences. If your story requires a galactic empire, well, you can't really have that without FTL (or some FTL-like work around like the giant monolith in the end of 2001 A Space Odyssey).

A book like Way Station is completely impossible without some fancy SF tech, but the story really has nothing to do with that tech, it is simply the enabling device that lets the story happen.

But SF tech can also serve the purpose of adding verisimilitude to the world creation. If your book's set in a future cyberpunk dystopian world and you have people running around with bows and arrows and using smoke signals to communicate, rather than high tech weapons and comm gear, the world building probably won't be believable. Props are there for a reason, and it's not usually as the focus of the story. They're a supporting role.

Contrary to John, though, I do not feel that there must be some explanation for invented technology, if that technology is not intimately involved in the actual story, rather than being an enabling device or playing some supporting role.

For example, in Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space universe, the near-lighspeed ship engines are never explained. In fact the author even acknowledges that they will never be explained, for the people using them don't even know how they work. Even more, if the people in the books attempt to tamper with said engines, the engines invariably go BOOM in a big way. The author is basically telling us that IT DOESN'T MATTER! All that matters is that there is some SF technology that allows his created universe to logically exist.

Another example of not explaining is the underrated, or at least too little known book, Memory by Linda Nagata. The book begins seeming like straight up fantasy, but as you move through it you discover there is a higher technology at work which only takes on the likeness of magic. The workings of this technology are never revealed because not even the characters in the story know how it works or even what it is. To have explained what the characters marvel at would have cheapened the story considerably. It's a very admirable book, BTW.

So ... in conclusion, it all boils down to the author being aware of how the technology works in the story in the meta sense (i.e. why the author has put it there in the first place). It's not required in SF and it's not mere embellishment unless it's handled poorly (lending verisimilitude to a story is not embellishment, IMHO).

I can tell you what I like in SF via favorites: Seveneves, the Remembrance of Earth Trilogy The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, Death's End, and Rendezvous with Rama. These all have a lot of detail and while I've seen them called boring, I loved them. Seveneves and Remembrance of Earth in particular are heavy on human drama. None of the stories can happen without the technology and the detail of explanation is, for me, one of the reasons they are favorites. All are fascinating.

For the theories, Star Trek, I'm fine with this but probably more in a movie sense. Mass Effect I'm not familiar with. Bottom line though it's the story and how it's written.

I like fictional science and imaginary tech. Pretty much everything we take for granted today was imagined by a Science Fiction author long before it existed.

Of course, all the low-hanging fruit has been plucked, so these days we’re verging into truly outrageous and fantastic areas which might as well be Fantasy.

For instance, artificial satellites existed in SF for nearly a century before Sputnik launched, and Arthur C. Clarke described the way modern geostationary communications satellites would work in the 1940s. Jules Verne was incredibly accurate about the location of the moon launch facility, combining economics and science to come to his conclusion. And so on.

Even the countdown we use for launches comes from a sci-fi movie. It was invented for dramatic effect, but it also makes good sense from a technical standpoint.

So yeah, I like it.

Micah wrote: I do not feel that there must be some explanation for invented technology, if that technology is not intimately involved in the actual story, rather than being an enabling device or playing some supporting role.

I agree. In fact, speaking as someone whose understanding of technology is slightly below that of the average hobbit, I quickly get lost if the author starts to explain how the tech works. I don't understand how any of the gadgets I use every day work; to me, electricity is magic travelling along wires, and wifi is invisible magic travelling through the air. I have a heart monitor embedded in my chest that sends messages to somewhere miles away while I'm asleep. How does it work? Well, I believe it uses GPS. Is that an explanation? No, it's a set of initials. It could be using PBS instead, for all I know or care. The effect of my technological ignorance is that if I draw a distinction between SF and fantasy, it can't be on the basis that the tech in SF is scientifically possible and the 'tech' in fantasy isn't, because I'm incapable of making that distinction. It can only be on some cruder and more obvious basis, such as that in fantasy people get around on horses or tame dragons, while in SF they get around using spaceships and matter transporters.

Which raises an interesting point. I don't understand how a matter transporter would work (though actually, I have read the suggestion, as I'm sure everyone else here has, that it wouldn't; what it would actually do is murder someone at one end of the process and create a copy of them at the other; and I still wouldn't understand how it was doing it), but now I think of it, I don't understand how a horse works, either. I have a general idea that you put hay into one end of it and that makes the legs move, but that's about it. So if SF writers should be explaining how spaceships work, shouldn't fantasy writers be explaining how horses work?

So if SF writers should be explaining how spaceships work, shouldn't fantasy writers be explaining how horses work?

Yeah! And the rest of the barnyard animals too!

Not an apples to apples, but could be interesting: explain animals to an alien tech like Rama. That is if you can spark their interest.

Micah has given me something to think about. I suppose that if a certain level of tech is simply an accepted part of society in the story's timeframe, then a detailed explanation of how it works isn't necessary, though a little note that the "xyz principle was discovered by Professor John Doe in 2415" may help to put it in perspective.

Likewise, over-explanation of the tech can be a bad thing. I just finished David Weber's latest "Honorverse" novel and found myself wondering why I needed to know all of the technical specifications of the Solarian League's Cataphract missile and how it compared with the Manticoran Mark 23...

At some point, the reader must be thinking "OK -- let's just skip all this techno-babble and get on with the story."

I think that it's all about managing readers' expectations. If I am getting indications that a book is hard SF, then I expect the tech to be very plausible and well researched. At the other extreme, some books make it clear that the tech is just window dressing, and that's OK too. What I don't like is info dumps about tech that make me focus on it yet are completely unconvincing. In my opinion, Ninefox Gambit starts out sounding like it's based on serious math, but then it becomes clear that it's just a magic system.

By the way, the blog post mentions Star Trek and the Mass Effect games. I think that both are near the same end of the continuum - tech as plot device, don't look too closely. Yes, Mass Effect had the Codex - which had a lot more than tech information. Star Trek has guides to its universe too. I remember looking up how fast Warp 1 was in a bookstore.

Again, it's all dependent on the kind of story you're writing.

If you're going for hard scifi, then the technobabble shouldn't really be all that much "babble" -- if you get my meaning -- but rather should be based on, or extrapolated logically from, sound scientific principles. How much of that you need to detail in writing is the tricky bit. There's no one-size-fits-all answer to that.

Kim Stanley Robinson did really good with that (in my opinion) in his Mars trilogy. There was enough tech talk to make it more or less plausible, but not enough that most people would find it tedious. I only wish I could say the same about his social construct in those books (particularly the last one). It may be hard SF, but that trilogy is really dumbed down in the human psychology and societal structure department. Hard Sociology it is not. (Again, in my opinion.)

Chris wrote: "Micah wrote: I do not feel that there must be some explanation for invented technology, if that technology is not intimately involved in the actual story, rather than being an enabling device or pl..."

THIS.

I had a terrible time getting through The Atrocity Archives due to over explaining. And other explanations of that sort. Even if the tech is very probable (The Martian), too much explanation makes me want to figure it out (newsflash: I cannot). I spent QUITE a lot of time trying to follow the equations in The Martian before I gave up. If I had been reading a print copy and not listening to the audio, I might have DNF'd it for that (my frustration).

A no-tech-explanation works easily in movies. Shield up. Blaster out. Warp drive. All visual. No explanation needed.

Hmm, The Martian, way better as a movie, more balanced.

Chris brings up an excellent point about understanding technology, "In fact, speaking as someone whose understanding of technology is slightly below that of the average hobbit, I quickly get lost if the author starts to explain how the tech works. I don't understand how any of the gadgets I use every day work;"

We don't understand how most of what we take for granted is always going to work for us as soon as we need it. People may know a lot about a couple of types of technology but there are thousands of different kinds of technologies and resulting equipment that they know little or nothing about.

Since we are already in the situation of not knowing how most things work that we make, and forget about the natural processes, that's a lost cause, there is no need for science fiction to be written in a way the justifies its existence technologically speaking.

A lot of effort is put into making our devices easier to use for better results without requiring any understanding of how those devices work. The same is true for writing about sci fi tech, you don't need to explain it, but you do need to make the description, or use, its play in the story as comfortable as possible for the reading of the story.

Many years ago, in all fields of writing for public publication the use of info dumps had a certain satisfaction of providing explanations of how things worked. People wanted to know how things worked. Our society has progressed to the point where most things are magic like again and we don't want to know how it works. We can't fix it when it breaks so why do we need to know how it works. There are other types of information that can be used as info dumps for the story. Much of the social background and past histories of characters lives is presented in info dump form and is perfectly acceptable. Human emotions will always have a sense of mystery and any insight will usually be accepted in any format the writer wishes to use.

As the resolution of our exploring devices, from microscopes to telescopes, continues to show us in increasing detail about what is around us our understanding of the world we live in and the universe around us becomes less and less understandable. Everything is is up for being re-explained and for a lot of it, there is no explanation that fits the new facts.

By incorporating the sense of wonderment through horror imposed by the machinery of technology into a characters actions or by just having them physically use or immerse them in the results of the technology without detailed explanations, that fits right into the show don't tell aspect of writing.

Seems like every other day something in the real world is claimed to be the biggest ever, slowest ever, fastest ever, epic sized, more variable than ever suspected, or never even suspected. This continual amazement of the world around us should be no problem to carry over into the world of science fiction.

MrsJoseph wrote: "I had a terrible time getting through The Atrocity Archives due to over explaining. And other explanations of that sort..."

Ha! I loved all that stuff. In fact I just recently finished the 4th in that series, The Apocalypse Codex. (Not as good as some of the others, but I still enjoyed it.)

The trick there, for me, was to just glide through all the technobabble and not worry about it so much. It was all kind of like a street hawker pedaling his wares with fast-talk and British showmanship. These are not very serious, but very nerdy, tongue-in-cheek books steeped in computer/gaming/SF/Lovecraftian BS geek culture. And, sometimes what appears to be total technobabble actually are references to real things (very probably used in total nonsense ways).

So I think a lot of that in this series is a matter of style. I've met Charles Stross and read some of his non-fiction blogging work. He's embarrassingly intelligent, sharp-minded, and well educated about tech, politics, economics and a wide range of other subjects. On panels at SF conventions, he never fails to come up with the "other" way of looking at questions and concepts.

Which is not to say a smart dude always writes smart books, but I can see where his polymath personality would lead to what we see in this series, and personally I kind of liked that.

Micah wrote: "It really depends on the kind of story you're telling and what the tech is supposed to accomplish. And of course the inclusion of fantasy level SF tech can be handled poorly or effectively..."

I agree that it depends a lot on how central the technology is to the story, but the alternative you raise is one I actually hadn't considered.

I assumed for my blog post that the technology was necessarily made by the society depicted in those stories, but if the actual designers of said technology are long gone and/or far more advanced than the society in the story, an explanation for the technology wouldn't just be unnecessary, it would actually be counterproductive to the storytelling.

Chris wrote: "By the way, the blog post mentions Star Trek and the Mass Effect games. I think that both are near the same end of the continuum - tech as plot device, don't look too closely. Yes, Mass Effect had the Codex - which had a lot more than tech information. Star Trek has guides to its universe too. I remember looking up how fast Warp 1 was in a bookstore."

I remember having a giant Star Trek encyclopaedia as a child, and it was great fun to read, but I’m not sure I agree that having tech as a plot device means you’re not supposed to look at it too closely. With Star Trek, that was certainly true, and Star Trek started to lose some of its appeal for me when I began to notice that a lot of its made-up technical terms had quite different real-world meanings. But with Mass Effect, even the mystery tech and the ultra-advanced nature of the arch-villains gets some technical backstory as you progress through the games, and that was a very enriching part of the plot – at least for me.

Admittedly, it’s kind of a false comparison since Star Trek is a collection of TV series whereas Mass Effect is a space opera RPG, but I think the tech is much more of a core plot device in the latter, which is why the developers put so much effort into creating the fictional technical background for it. You’re meant to look closely if your curiosity so inclines you.

Micah wrote: "Ha! I loved all that stuff. In fact I just recently finished the 4th in that series, The Apocalypse Codex. (Not as good as some of the others, but I still enjoyed it.)

The trick there, for me, was to just glide through all the technobabble and not worry about it so much. It was all kind of like a street hawker pedaling his wares with fast-talk and British showmanship. These are not very serious, but very nerdy, tongue-in-cheek books steeped in computer/gaming/SF/Lovecraftian BS geek culture. And, sometimes what appears to be total technobabble actually are references to real things (very probably used in total nonsense ways)."


And here is where the hammer meets the nail, lol. I'm the reader that has no problem looking stuff up.

It's how I know the Martian's science is probable and how I know Stross DOES put a lot of true references/science/equations, etc in his works.

I just don't have a brain for math and/or overly complicated computer programming. So I read, find something I am clueless about (this happens less than you'd expect, I'm pretty well read) and I look it up. (This cannot be changed it is now a permanent part of my reading DNA. Blame mom.)

I look it up- and get lost in the weeds asap.

The weeds can be fun. Unless of course the author is a big wind bag.

MrsJoseph wrote: I spent QUITE a lot of time trying to follow the equations in The Martian before I gave up. If I had been reading a print copy and not listening to the audio, I might have DNF'd it for that (my frustration).

You have reminded me of this (I can't find a short clip online, so start at 7 minutes 10 seconds and watch till 9 minutes):

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5h...

John wrote: "Micah has given me something to think about. I suppose that if a certain level of tech is simply an accepted part of society in the story's timeframe, then a detailed explanation of how it works is..."

I really enjoyed a pile of the Honor books. But then they seemed to get incredibly bogged down in both political narrative, and constant tech specs.

I love Honor as a character. I enjoy a number of the secondary characters, but I'm not sure how the editor has missed editing some of the later books more tightly.

Chris wrote: "You have reminded me of this (I can't find a short clip online, so start at 7 minutes 10 seconds and watch till 9 minutes)"

That reminds me of something Larry Niven said: if you have something complicated to impart, explain it as simply as possible. If what you’re talking about is easy to understand, say it any way you like.

Words to live by. And to write by.

Chris wrote: "I agree. In fact, speaking as someone whose understanding of technology is slightly below that of the average hobbit, I quickly get lost if the author starts to explain how the tech works. I don't understand how any of the gadgets I use every day work; to me, electricity is magic travelling along wires, and wifi is invisible magic travelling through the air. ."

I can’t imagine living like this, and I assume you’re exaggerrating for effect, but I do know quite a lot of people for whom technology is effectively magic. It’s clear that’s the same for many authors.

In the Sharon Shinn Archangel series, she has a society that hasn’t even begun the Industrial Revolution and yet she has a character effectively invent a satellite phone. It was so ridiculously preposterous that I reread the passage to make sure I hadn’t just hallucinated.

In the book this is a lost space colony which has genetically engineered winged people whose singing somehow alerts the AI in the orbiting starship to hear their prayers and requests. (It’s basically Dragonriders of Pern where the people and dragons are one character.) By invoking “spaceship” and “AI”, I guess Shinn figured that a guy who was essentially a jeweler creating a phone to talk to the computer was no biggie. But this devolved civilization just had basic metallurgy. Between “hammer” and “satphone” are about 20,000 technological steps, including uncovering things like magnetism and the Theory of Relativity.

The person who can make the mental leap from blacksmith to astrophysics is not just a genius, that person is godlike. I mean that unironically. He’d have to be all the brilliant minds we’ve ever heard of combined.

But Shinn treats it as magic, because she doesn’t understand how it works. Just as she doesn’t understand that sticking wings on people won’t allow them to fly.

Which is fine in a Fantasy novel, but treating science like magic broke the story for me, thus I lost the threads of whatever themes she might have been trying to impart.


Chris wrote: "now I think of it, I don't understand how a horse works, either. I have a general idea that you put hay into one end of it and that makes the legs move, but that's about it. So if SF writers should be explaining how spaceships work, shouldn't fantasy writers be explaining how horses work"

It’s pretty obvious most Fantasy novelists DON’T know how horses work. You can probably find a hundred articles talking about this issue just by searching “horses aren’t cars”.

It’s always amazed me how many people love horses, yet when they write about equines nearly every detail is wrong. Horses are tremendously strong and fast compared to a person, but they aren’t machines which can cover hundreds of miles without rest, or carry three adults for days on end.

(Of course, I’m not talking about magic horses who have been imbued with some supernatural abilities, just ordinary horses who do superhorse things because the author didn’t visit a farm.)

Yes, our intelligence was important, as was our complex social cooperation, but one of the reasons why humans dominated the world is purely physical. This is a key rule of thumb: almost every animal can run faster than man, but no animal can run farther.

You need to go 20 miles really fast? Ride a horse. You need to go 200 miles really fast? Run.

Humans are the ultimate persistence hunters. No animal can run prey to ground the way people can. It doesn’t matter how big or ferocious or fast, humans will wear it down by running it down. The only animal which even comes close to the human capacity for persistence hunting is, surprise, the wolf. It’s no accident we teamed up early and dogs were our first domesticated animal.

It seems ridiculous on the face of it that three men with sharp sticks can kill a lion, but that’s all we need. The lion does the math and starts to run, and the men jog along behind him. Every time the lion looks back, there are those three pursuers. But a lion doesn’t have the stamina of a human and soon is exhausted. Poke, poke, dead.

That’s how we tamed the planet. Which is not a secret, yet so few Fantasy writers seem to know this, and use horses like pickup trucks.

Trike wrote: Chris wrote: "I agree. In fact, speaking as someone whose understanding of technology is slightly below that of the average hobbit, I quickly get lost if the author starts to explain how the tech works. I don't understand how any of the gadgets I use every day work; to me, electricity is magic travelling along wires, and wifi is invisible magic travelling through the air. ."

I can’t imagine living like this, and I assume you’re exaggerrating for effect

I was referencing this from Tolkien:

"[Hobbits] do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom"

I could probably make a forge-bellows or a water-mill, but a hand-loom is more complicated, and I don't think I could make one without a bit of research. So no, I was not exaggerating.

If you mean the bit about magic travelling along wires, I stand by that. I do not understand electricity. The wire is stationary, yet something is travelling along it. No, cannot compute. In the end you probably need to understand quantum mechanics to explain it, and as Richard Feynman pointed out, no-one understands that.

P.S. I probably come across as some sort of technophobe. I'm not. I like gadgets. Some of them, at least.

Trike wrote: Humans are the ultimate persistence hunters.

Yes, I've seen African hunters hunting down prey on film. It's impressive.

Trike wrote: "Trike wrote: Humans are the ultimate persistence hunters..."

No doubt. You should see me when I'm hunting down a burger and fries.

Mmm. Burger and fries.

Fantastic thread. I'm not sure if I have a lot more to contribute because so many good points have been made, but without stating the obvious I think it all depends on the writer's skill.

I have read books with a lot of technobabble that I found added to the story, (even if I didn't fully understand it) as to me it enhanced the portrayal of the future environment with super advanced technology.

I have also read books with technobabble that frustrated me, and removed from the story because it was simply not necessary or didn't make any sense and seemed to be contradictory (at least from what I understood).

I have no problem with the science in my sci-fi not being well explained or entirely fictional. I just don't want it to be arbitrary or inconsistent.

Jack McDevitt (my favorite author) includes a lot of unlikely science in his books, and doesn't spend a lot of time trying to convince us why it makes sense, and I appreciate that. It allows me to just enjoy the story. I mean his ideas usually start from something credible/possible, and then they just take it to extremes for the sake of the story. Maybe they're possible, maybe not. In the context of the stories I don't care.

The "rescue" at the end of Deepsix in particular (view spoiler)[In which he uses a broken space elevator to create a "scooper" like the one you use to get dead fish out of your aquarium, and they literally "fish" the people off the surface of the planet from outer space (hide spoiler)]. It's bananas, based very loosely in potentially real science, but takes serious liberties in how possible it really is.

And most of his books involve one form or another of hyperspace, including things happening IN hyperspace. Which of course is entirely made up. But in his stories, there are "rules" about the particular hyperspace. And as long as he follows his own rules, I'm perfectly happy.

I just don't have more of an appreciation of hard sci-fi. It's not like I know all the science. If I read something that's termed "hard sci-fi", I'm pretty much taking their word for it on most counts anyway.

I like the idea of fictional tech. I mean, the TARDIS isn't plausible. But, it makes Dr. Who enjoyable. And, then there's the whole creating a chimera thing, true some lab creations like chimera do exist, but there could be fictional chimera, like the one from Full Metal Alchemist. Point is, I need fictional tech in my stories. They make me keep reading (and watching) and it doesn't bother me one bit.