I was a critter this week for the first chapter (thought at 10k it was a long first chapter) of an ostensibly SF novel but it had no science except for the mention of the term "wormholes" and "temporal physics" I exchanged emails in a brief discussion with author who told me he was told to cut info dumps from earlier drafts because they slowed down the story and likewise he told me another critter this week had called what little science terminology was used as "uber science talk".

But this is NOT about the novel I crittered.

The Ultimate point to this post is what can the author expect from "SF" readers. To me modern IT provides a wealth of information at places like Wikipedia, that if used judicially gives MCs more creditability. Maybe authors not generally having a science background might see the world "physics" and go cross-eyed but should we expect that of the person who willing picks up an SF novel/short story?

Now I'm not saying SF should read like the ficitional adaptation of a Quantum Mechanics textbook but I am saying that words like "wormhole" and many many other words should necessarily be marginalized to brief mentions.

As a writer I hold to this axiom: If Science is the Maguffin if it is the reason for the story then it has to be mentioned and at least marginally developed while if you're writing a story simply set in space/future the rules are different.

But for readers obviously motives must be different. But are readers really so uninformed or uneducated that they can't handle words like temporal physics quantum mechanics, cosmic strings etc with having a brain cramp? As long as there's at least some explanation of the how something works/what it does provided in story (I personally like David Weber's style here)the reader doesn't need to know multi-variate calculus.

Am I wrong in assuming this? I'm a social scientist by trade and training but I've taken and done well in college calculus chem and physics. Yet I feel that American society in particular but "western" society in general is so steeped in technological phenomena that its should be considered taboo to use some technical talk above basic terminology.

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...he was told to cut info dumps from earlier drafts because they slowed down the story and likewise he told me another critter this week had called what little science terminology was used as "uber science talk".

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First, told to take it out by whom? An editor who wants to pay him for the book, or a wannabe writer in his crit circle? Nowhere do you give us an indication of how mature the writing was. Is it rank amateur or has this person sold professionally? It makes a big difference here. That brings me to the second point.

Second, Ten thousand words of a supposed science fiction novel with a few sci-fi-sounding terms that survived the purge of "uber science talk" screams of a writer that knows not of what he writes.

To answer your question, the typical fan now expects Star Wars. That is now the public perception of science fiction. They watched Will Smith in I, Robot and think it was great because it had flashing lights and car chases, or they think it was stupid and would never read that book by some guy named Asimov, not knowing that the movie and book were entirely different. That's your public for SF.

Why do you think a Star Wars novel is often on the bestseller list? One was on the list in my local paper just last week. That's where are readers are going. The rest of the public says "I don't like scifi" because they see through the crap at the movies and realize there's no depth to the plots

I took a novel writing class last summer. We critiqued each others first chapters. When my very SF first chapter came up to the top of the pile, the guy writing a thriller said this: "I don't normally like science fiction, but I really enjoyed this."

What does that tell me? It tells me the public perception of science fiction is entirely driven by what they see on the idiot box or at the box office. There's a whole universe of science fiction stories out there, and this guy would like them, but he'll never read them. He thinks about Mork and Mindy when he's missing out on Neuromancer. He thinks of Alf and misses out on Foundation. It goes on and on.

That said, there are readers out there. They buy SF, and they expect it to be good. Throwing in words because they sound like sci-fi won't hold these readers' attention. They won't stand for it. To attract those readers, you have to be solid. You have to write a science fiction, not scifi. Most of all, you have to know what you're talking about. Make no bones about it, writing science fiction well is not easy.

To deal directly with your first comments all of this person's critiques thus far are all lay editors or at best trained but not for pay editors. And to be fair while the author didn't seem to handle the "science" parts well it did do well with character development. Personally I'm all for Heinlien's Rule #5 here.

To the current status of the American SF market, I couldn't agree with you more Spaceman. Hollywood supported Space Opera is the dominant sub-genre though Military is making a pretty strong run and personally is fairly "hard." David Weber's work especially is an exemplar of this field.

[This message has been edited by Matt Lust (edited May 16, 2007).]

I think one of the big problems with people going from critting short stories to novels is that they forget how big a novel is. There can and will be paragraphs of explanations that fill the reader in on chunks of information that the writer is not, and should not, put in story form. I agree there should be effort placed in trying to keep those explanations from being dull and boring, but they do happen.

The only books I've read that have side note paragraphs (or pages) that give long details about some technology or another fall under the "hard" scifi category. While I personally would rather they skip anything not relevant to the story, I can understand that some people want to know. That said, I'll never be a "hard" scifi writer. Unless you have a strong knowledge of the sciences you are going in depth about: don't do it. Explaining things that directly relate to the story, and the characters, is my preference. While I might not be an expert in all of the sciences, I can spot a badly attempted bluff any day. I bet it is more insulting to those who actually know it.

What is termed as sci-fi seems to cover a pretty broad range.

Rick is prejudiced toward hard sci-fi, "TRUE" sci-fi, in which the science is provides an integral, nay essential thrust to the story. For instance, in Dune the science of the water collection system was essential to the story. But in watered-down sci-fi, the writer throws in alien planets or space ships or time shifts when none are really important to the story. I mean, really, any of the Star Wars novels could have been placed in just about any time frame or technological age.

But, going on to readers, there are different strokes for different folks.

Not everyone enjoys hard sci-fi. I'm not all that enthralled with it. But I DO enjoy 'escaping' as I read into different times and places--past or future or fantastical. As do MANY readers.

But, ah, readers.

Readers of hard sci-fi, it seems to me, are often very intelligent, but not often very artistically minded. They read solely for the science and couldn't care less if the story is well told or the characters well drawn out. They don't give a crap if you use too many adverbs or static verbs.

Readers of popular fiction, though they MAY lack the higher intelligence, match the hard sci-fi readers in their lack of knowledge of writing mechanics. All they really care about is that they can understand the story well enough to follow what's going on, and that the story keeps them interested. The very most basic reader skills. The skills that get kids reading.

There really are few readers out there who understand the mechanics and the art of writing well enough to judge good writing when they read it. Most of them are probably wannabe writers like us.

What I'm getting at is that it's all a matter of supply and demand. There are plenty of writers who are willing and able to supply what the market demands. The trouble is that there really simply isn't a huge demand for a good story TOLD WELL. But there's plenty of demand for a pretty good story told mediocrily (I made up a word!)

The more books I read, the more I really come to believe that.

*sigh*

Now, I remember reading and being influenced by the SF stories he wrote---and I'm coming to realize I like the SF tropes, so to speak, but not the notion of figuring out everything down to the last decimal point and sticking with it. I like things to be right, but I'd much rather come up with some idea and then justify it as well as possible---but to stick with the idea even if I can't.

[edited to correct something where I revised at one point but not at another.]

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Rick is prejudiced toward hard sci-fi, "TRUE" sci-fi, in which the science is provides an integral, nay essential thrust to the story.

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No, it's not strictly hard SF in the Analog definition that I'm talking about. Even the softer SF has to be based on physical reality or you start talking about science fantasy. There is an entire broad speculative spectrum from hard SF on one side to high fantasy on the other side. I don't mean any specific place on the spectrum, only that we are on the SF side of the origin.

Larry Niven coined the term bolognium for somethign that violates our understanding of the way the world works. According to Niven, any SF story can easily sustain one piece of bolognium. It takes real skill to pull off a second piece of bolognium. Three pieces of bolognium takes a grand master to pull off and still be SF. Four or more pieces of bolognium and you are writing a (science) fantasy--paranthesis mine.

What I'm talking about here is the bolognium vs the BS. You can write bolognium into any sort of SF story, and many stories even rely on the bolognium.

It's about believability. Ben Bova's Mars was a terrific hard SF story (with real characters, too), but he threw in bolognium. Not much, but it's there. OSC throws in more bolognium in Ender's Game, but it doesn't make his stories collapse because we believe it. He tells the story in such a way that his bolognium is consistent with what we experience in real life, so we believe his bolognium. (And remember that he's a future grand master.)

The destinction I'm making is one of depth.

The scifi readers want to stay in their comfort zone. They want characters they know doing the things they saw them do on TV. They want Vulcan neck pinches and light saber battles and a TARDIS appearing in snowy New Hampshire. They don't care if a spaceship goes whoosh in a vacuum. They don't care that a transporter is preposterous. They saw it on TV and that's what they expect in the books. They don't have to think to bring up a picture of the character, they have it stored from what they watched on TV.

The science fiction readers want something new. They want new ideas, new places to explore, and new characters to meet. They want to experience and get to know these characters. They want all the pieces to fit together. They want to think a little bit. They want to draw their own picture of the characters. They want new IDEAS, but they want those ideas to be concrete, and at least partly based on physics as we know it.

I'm not saying that good stories can't be found in the hired gun media arena. I've read some excellent hired gun scifi stories, and I've read some terrible but original science fiction stories. The discussion isn't about quality of story, it's about reader expectations.

Readers come to Kurt Vonnegut with the expectation of a solid literary novel. Vonnegut slips his SF in sideways and "mainstream" readers accept it because the words science fiction do not appear on the spine of the book. Cat's Cradle is a science fiction book, no question about that. His bolognium is ice nine.

Readers come to a Star Trek novel expecting to read something that feels like what they saw on TV. They want new stories in an old universe using characters that belong to a conglomerate and an author who gets paid once. They want fiction churned out by a machine written to a formula that sells and makes money for the conglomerate.

Readers come to Harlan Ellison or Isaac Asimov or Orson Scott Card or Larry Niven or Anne McCaffrey or Tobias Buckell or S.M. Stirling or Frederik Pohl (and on and on) because these people have something new to say in a new way in a universe where the author has all the control and gets to tell the story the author's way.

Niven's got it partly right about bolognium and you couldn't be more on target about good authors being able to sell bolognium while also telling a good story.

If I ever get a spare moment from my "real" grad work (currently pursuing PhD in Sociology) and get a chance to do some independent research, there's a particular issue of writing that absolutely fascinates me. It is the "world creation" and "world maintenance" that takes place in a story as done by the author. These are not simply setting development or milieu creation but are also about creation of integrity within the story.

Writing is a social act, its communication done not to one's self but with one's self to other people. Yet as with many form of communication, many humans are ineffective in written communication, even, especially, when you ignore factors like illiteracy. The added requirement that fiction be truth that is not real* makes telling a convincing story, for nearly all people, an impossibility.

Yet human history is filled with people who have generated stories, tales and myths filled with truths and half truths. Thus it is something humans can do but not all human can do it and in this difference lies the strength of a story's world creation and maintenance.

Moreover when you consider a specific genre's special rules, here SF and all its assorted sub genres, the delicate trust between author and audience becomes all the more important as one author's definitions of the genre will conflict with some reader's definition of the genre. Yet a good storyteller will be able to transcend genre bias through a convincing telling of a plausible world.