Why I Don't Write Science Fiction
Oct. 10th, 2002 09:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_gneechWhen working on my writing, I've been concentrating on my fantasy, but I've also played around quite a bit with science fiction over the years. However, when I decided to actually start trying to write for publication, I left SF behind, for a few reasons.
Don't Pick at That Nit, It'll Only Get Worse
In the SF RPG 2300 A.D., there are pages and pages of tables that have things like the atomic weights of various gases, cross-referenced such that you can tell that if you have a planet of thus-and-such size, with a composition of this-that-and-the-other, then you will have an atmosphere composed of yadda-yadda-yadda. These are supposed to be very helpful in creating fictional worlds, but they were so friggin' dense that I couldn't even begin to crack them.
I just pictured a room full of nerdy planetology geeks with calculators and bad hair, reading through my stuff and snerking arrogantly about how that world couldn't possibly exist, because the concentration of cobalt in the atmosphere would be toxic to breathe, or some such -- and getting snooty e-mails to that effect. And I thought, "I don't care if I impress these people! I don't care to have anything to do with them!" But SF editors, from what I've gathered, do want to impress them -- and many of them are such people.
Case in point, I wrote a little bit for a SF RPG I was running, just a piece of flavor text, that talked about the concept of a "system buoy." It's basically a large computer with a radio transmitter, that plots the locations and trajectories of all known objects in a system at a "universal" time. Thus, if you know how far away from the buoy you are and what your own time is relative to it, you can make an educated guess about where everything is, and if you're in danger of getting caught in a gravity well or colliding with an asteroid or something.
Hardly a revolutionary concept, I know. :) However, in the flavor text, I described this buoy as being fixed at a position 1 AU over the northern "pole" of a star, in reaction to which, HantaMouse wrote in the margin, "...thus violating all known laws of physics by resisting the star's gravitational pull."
Okay, you caught me, but on the other hand, who the hell cares? It doesn't matter to the story! If people can travel through hyperspace and generate artifical gravity fields, surely they can find a way to fix an object in space relative to another object without too much difficulty.
This is the kind of thing I don't feel like dealing with, but it's the sort of thing that SF writers get all the time. And worse, it's the kind of thing that SF readers take great glee in -- an absurd fascination with inconsequential minutiae.
Hey, That Planet Wasn't There When I Wrote This!
I have tried a few times to build an interstellar setting using the Gleise astronomical data ... placing relatively friendly aliens at Tau Ceti, using 3d models built by HantaMouse to figure out colonization routes and civilization trends, etc. But the problem is, the Gleise data is rather incomplete, not entirely coherent, and keeps being updated! Anything I write now, could very well be invalidated by this time next year. And with real, honest-to-goodness extraterrestrial planets being found by astronomers, if I put a planet at Tau Ceti, it's more or less a guarantee that in five years it will be announced that there is no such thing. But I don't have the patience to keep up with that stuff.
But ... Westerns In Space Are So Damn COOL!
And this, of course, is the biggie.
Hard SF bores me to tears.
I want sleek fighters zooming through meteor showers, zapping away at aliens while making bank turns. I want cat-headed aliens who come from an angry volcanic planet, conquering the galaxy. I want to read about Han and Chewie tooling around the Corporate Sector in the Millineum Falcon.
I emphatically don't want arguments over funding for the new radio telescope, detailed calculations of whether five people can survive on 30 cubic feet of oxygen or only four, or groundbreaking insights on what the structure of carbon nitrate becomes in a methane atmosphere. In the words of the MST3K guys, "Can the prune juice and death-ray something!"
A lot of the people who like hard SF, hate me for liking schlock, and would hate me even more if I tried to publish it. This was made famous by a prominent SF editor complaining about the "space westerns" he hated so much; others have talked about how they'll automatically reject any story that has cat-headed aliens in it.
So fine, I'll keep my schlock to myself and enjoy it immensely. Or I'll publish it in comics, where schlock has a happy home. I'm not going to try to write the SF that editors want, because I wouldn't want to read it. If the editors change their mind, well, then we'll see. :)
-The Gneech
PS: Okay, well maybe not bank turns. But you get the point.
Don't Pick at That Nit, It'll Only Get Worse
In the SF RPG 2300 A.D., there are pages and pages of tables that have things like the atomic weights of various gases, cross-referenced such that you can tell that if you have a planet of thus-and-such size, with a composition of this-that-and-the-other, then you will have an atmosphere composed of yadda-yadda-yadda. These are supposed to be very helpful in creating fictional worlds, but they were so friggin' dense that I couldn't even begin to crack them.
I just pictured a room full of nerdy planetology geeks with calculators and bad hair, reading through my stuff and snerking arrogantly about how that world couldn't possibly exist, because the concentration of cobalt in the atmosphere would be toxic to breathe, or some such -- and getting snooty e-mails to that effect. And I thought, "I don't care if I impress these people! I don't care to have anything to do with them!" But SF editors, from what I've gathered, do want to impress them -- and many of them are such people.
Case in point, I wrote a little bit for a SF RPG I was running, just a piece of flavor text, that talked about the concept of a "system buoy." It's basically a large computer with a radio transmitter, that plots the locations and trajectories of all known objects in a system at a "universal" time. Thus, if you know how far away from the buoy you are and what your own time is relative to it, you can make an educated guess about where everything is, and if you're in danger of getting caught in a gravity well or colliding with an asteroid or something.
Hardly a revolutionary concept, I know. :) However, in the flavor text, I described this buoy as being fixed at a position 1 AU over the northern "pole" of a star, in reaction to which, HantaMouse wrote in the margin, "...thus violating all known laws of physics by resisting the star's gravitational pull."
Okay, you caught me, but on the other hand, who the hell cares? It doesn't matter to the story! If people can travel through hyperspace and generate artifical gravity fields, surely they can find a way to fix an object in space relative to another object without too much difficulty.
This is the kind of thing I don't feel like dealing with, but it's the sort of thing that SF writers get all the time. And worse, it's the kind of thing that SF readers take great glee in -- an absurd fascination with inconsequential minutiae.
Hey, That Planet Wasn't There When I Wrote This!
I have tried a few times to build an interstellar setting using the Gleise astronomical data ... placing relatively friendly aliens at Tau Ceti, using 3d models built by HantaMouse to figure out colonization routes and civilization trends, etc. But the problem is, the Gleise data is rather incomplete, not entirely coherent, and keeps being updated! Anything I write now, could very well be invalidated by this time next year. And with real, honest-to-goodness extraterrestrial planets being found by astronomers, if I put a planet at Tau Ceti, it's more or less a guarantee that in five years it will be announced that there is no such thing. But I don't have the patience to keep up with that stuff.
But ... Westerns In Space Are So Damn COOL!
And this, of course, is the biggie.
Hard SF bores me to tears.
I want sleek fighters zooming through meteor showers, zapping away at aliens while making bank turns. I want cat-headed aliens who come from an angry volcanic planet, conquering the galaxy. I want to read about Han and Chewie tooling around the Corporate Sector in the Millineum Falcon.
I emphatically don't want arguments over funding for the new radio telescope, detailed calculations of whether five people can survive on 30 cubic feet of oxygen or only four, or groundbreaking insights on what the structure of carbon nitrate becomes in a methane atmosphere. In the words of the MST3K guys, "Can the prune juice and death-ray something!"
A lot of the people who like hard SF, hate me for liking schlock, and would hate me even more if I tried to publish it. This was made famous by a prominent SF editor complaining about the "space westerns" he hated so much; others have talked about how they'll automatically reject any story that has cat-headed aliens in it.
So fine, I'll keep my schlock to myself and enjoy it immensely. Or I'll publish it in comics, where schlock has a happy home. I'm not going to try to write the SF that editors want, because I wouldn't want to read it. If the editors change their mind, well, then we'll see. :)
-The Gneech
PS: Okay, well maybe not bank turns. But you get the point.
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no subject
Date: 2002-10-10 10:42 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2002-10-10 11:29 am (UTC)I'm with you TG. I could care less HOW someone does something in an SF thing as much as what the REAL story is. Give me the good stuff. I don't ask questions about how the Millenium Falcon goes to light speed (when we all know your not supposed to be able to do that, let alone play chess, use the force, and other such things while going that fast), I just wanna know Where they are going, and what they are going to do about that 'Small moon' that the Tie Fighter is heading toward.
Thats not saying I don't care about some aspects of 'realism'. In fact, if its general knowledge, meaning 99.99% of people should know something about it, then I expect that to be portrayed right. Sort of like in Wing Commander (a horrible movie in and of itself). The fighter crashes outside the force field, on the 'deck'. They order a robot to go push the fighter off the deck, and it rolls out, and shoves the fighter off, and it falls 'down'. DOWN?!? Things do not fall DOWN. Ok... I could handle 'artificial gravity' keeping the ship on the deck, but why in merciful heck would it keep affecting the fighter once it was off the side of the ship? Ok... not a real big thing compared to "Your planet needs at least .2% more free oxygen or you'll never have a chance for life to be created."... but still.
Uh... just curious... but when did "Science Fiction" become "Science Fact, oh and its got this really neat plot involving some aliens that are accurately portrayed"? Its FICTION. Its like Starship troopers, where the guys are hopping around in powered suits with flame throwers on their arms and NUCLEAR frickin' MISSILES on their shoulders. Does anyone say "This book stinks because it doesn't portray how stuff really would work now, here in the year 2002"? No... they say... wow, we can make a movie about this, but throw out 95% of the book and use the last 5% of it, and we'll make MILLIONS! *blink* Sorry... I'm ranting now. Sorry TG.
Uh... I'm sure somewhere in there is a profound statement. But me, I'm still laughing my head off thinking about the idea of someone using a slide ruler to commit Sepuku.
--Rhan
no subject
If you are trying to portray accurate science in science fiction, it should not violate what we already know. But there is much room to extrapolate about what we don't know, and no one sweats later-discovered details. (They cheer when you get something right, though.)
Heinlein wrote hard-SF stories about aquatic populations on Venus. We know better now, but the stories are still good. That's OK.
And curiously, the book Starship Troopers, with the shoulder mounted nuclear missles, seems more plausible to me now than previously. Now we can build those missiles.
The movie, on the other hand, was more "Barbarella" style and was not even trying to be serious science fiction -- or serious people-drama. Let me see if I can sum this up: The movie Starship Troopers.... sucked as you would say, but the reasons were generally people-reasons, not science-flaws.
I'm amused at The Gneech's little jab: "...arguments over funding for the new radio telescope" -- it is indeed this sort of thing that is involved in the hard SF story I'm writing. ;) In fact, funding for the Space Shuttle is cut, and the world will end as a direct consequence. The Gneech wants something more exciting. ;)
(Now The Gneech will jump in proclaiming that he wasn't aiming that remark at me, and I will note that I was just amusing myself, and that no offense was taken, nor intended. In fact, we can consider all of this done.) ;)
Hard SF can be bad or good. "Have Space Suit, Will Travel" is a good hard SF story that indeed has cat-headed aliens in it.
One of the best hard SF stories written in decades, Footfall, is populated by an alien race of cute baby elephants. Seriously. It's very well done indeed.
And faster than light travel forms a part of many hard SF worlds. It's better to speak little of the mechanism, and assume that it's there. It may not be do-able, but few scientists would rule out any and all dodges that accomplish the same end.
I don't think that very many readers have the fixation on technical aspects that you two are worried about. I would be a prime candidate to be such a person, and I find myself more annoyed at the portrayal of people in such stories.
For example: The remake of "Planet of the Apes" was good, but they should have used computer-generated people; it would have been more realistic. :/
===|==============/ Level Head
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Yeah, what you said. :) I was actually thinking of a specific book I read once when I was trying to get "up to date" on modern SF, but have now forgotten which book it was. The main thing I remember is that it spent chapters on university administrivia, and I gave up halfway through.
I don't remember now what got me going on this rant in the first place, even. I remember I was having a discussion with Laurie about what worked and didn't work in fiction generally, and we were sharing gripes about recent books we were disappointed in. How that wandered into me ranting about hard sf, I have no idea! :)
-The Gneech
Re:
Date: 2002-10-11 08:32 am (UTC)No one would deny that it is excellent hard science fiction.
I probably should clarify my remark about the movie Starship Troopers: The science sucked too.
===|==============/ Level Head
no subject
Date: 2002-10-11 01:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-10-11 02:35 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2002-10-11 03:21 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2002-10-10 12:19 pm (UTC)Any time something unexplained happens, it's a wizard's fault. Err.... a SPACE wizard's fault.
Worst Misquote... Ever!
Date: 2002-10-10 12:41 pm (UTC)"but"
"Wizard!"
Then again, given the context change to fit this situation..
*blaims a wizard*
^~Kai
Re: Worst Misquote... Ever!
Date: 2002-10-10 12:47 pm (UTC)"but"
"Wizard!"
i made a booboo myself. :P
*ruffles Spork's hair*
^~Kai
Re: Worst Misquote... Ever!
Date: 2002-10-10 01:02 pm (UTC)*looks in a mirror*
Oh, wait. There's.... not much difference. My hair is that length where it won't respond to combs at all, but it's still too short for my liking. "GROW FASTER!" I say!
Re: Worst Misquote... Ever!
Date: 2002-10-11 06:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-10-10 12:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-10-10 05:08 pm (UTC)Space Opera vs Science Fiction
Date: 2002-10-10 06:07 pm (UTC)No one faults a writer whose science turns out to be mistaken later on, as long as their extrapolations were reasonable (Larry Niven wrote about Mercury being tidal-locked to the Sun, a situation that we now know not to be the case), but they will never forgive a writer whose science is wrong. Which is why I stick to writing space opera rather than hard SF, although I do enjoy reading it. My physics and math skills just aren't up to the task. Place your story far enough in the future, and Clarke's Third Law starts to take effect.
And Gneech, there are plenty of editors who will read (and buy) space opera, since the bookshelves are filled with them. The real problem, as I see it, is that the state of the scientific art has advanced so far since the birth of the genre that even space opera has to have a modicum of real science in it. Heinlein may have been able to write about an aquatic Venusian race, but you couldn't write about such a situation on any world at all, let alone on Venus, because we now know it just isn't possible.
The best SF, in my opinion, is the stuff that keeps the attitude of space opera while not completely ignoring the science.
Have you read David Brin's Uplift books, Gneech? There's a series of space opera in the grand tradition, with plenty of bafflegab and pseudo-science, which is not a whit worse for it, and the books have all been favorably received. I recommend them.
Re: Space Opera vs Science Fiction
I dunno, maybe my attention span has just gotten too short for -- Ooh! Something SHINY! *chases*
-The Gneech
no subject
Here I've been trying to write Hard Science Fiction
with Fox and Giraffe headed aliens in it.
Silly me! ;)
Scott
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Well DUH! ;) -TG
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Date: 2002-10-11 12:48 pm (UTC)Exactly the reason there are few fantasy works I really like. Most are such obvious generic clones of one another I just toss the book aside [Wheel of Time... I can't believe I made it through more than 3 of those before rereading LoTR, noticing the million and one similarities and returning the series to my brother].
If Hollywood can make the effort of not naming all aliens Klingons, then fantasy writers can bloody well make the effort and not use Tolkien's characters over and over and over again... Is it that hard to come up with a new species [how many species Tolkien had invented himself and how many he adopted is quite irrelevant, there's a difference between adoption&improvement and blatant plagiarism].
...and who the heck presented Contact as Hard SciFi? 2001/2010 are Hard SciFi, Contact should be buried along with ID4, never to be talked about again. :p
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Date: 2002-10-11 12:58 pm (UTC)Torment, I hail thee. :)