a science fiction glossary? or book?

Hi,

You do need to have a basic understanding of science to know which rules you're breaking. But often you want to leave science behind completely. Star Wars for example is science fantasy - it contains almost nothing of science in it - which is lucky because when they tried to add something vaguely scientific sounding to it - ie midiclorions - they got blasted. And as for light sabres how the hell can they possibly work? Beams of light - ie lasers - pass through one another but these ones apparently bounce off one another so they can sword fight with them. So do they explain that? Hell no!

Cheers, Greg.
 
Phyrebrat said:
Are we such snobs that we can't enjoy sff like SW anymore?
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The Original Starwars was very enjoyable. But it wasn't a book. Nor was it very good SF. It was Space Opera/Fantasy.
Also it wasn't a book!

If you want to write Space Opera or Fantasy and the characters and story is good, then don't worry about Science and Technology. It may be fantastic to read, a best seller, great fun. But it won't be decent SF if it's got mindless technobabble instead of making sense on the level of logic and reality as we know it. Learning SF tropes just enables a writer to do poor copies of existing popular films. It's more appropriate to Holywood / TV scriptwriting than writing an SF novel.
 
I think we're arguing semantics here over naming, and personal preference. Whilst I agree moves are not the same as books, the same mechanism of suspension of disbelief is involved.

To quote Eddie Izzard, I'm very 'thinly read' when it comes to Sci Fi - (four Arthur C Clarke's, Ringworld and... erm... I think that's about it unless the many Michael Crichton books I've read count) so I can't give you any examples. I just don't for one second believe that the layman who reads these books looks at them in such an elitist manner to assert 'it won't be decent sci-fi'. Also, I'm not sure what criteria you mean by 'level of logic and reality as we know it' as I think your standards may be higher than others who don't have your level of education <cough> me <cough> :)

pH
 
Phyrebrat said:
the same mechanism of suspension of disbelief is involved.
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No, I don't think so at all, because it's visual and audible. Books are read.
You can be much more outrageous in a film. This is why there they are loads of "cult following" films (Forbidden planet, Dark star) and big blockbusters that are quite different from books, very small proportion of film or TV "SF" watchers read SF books and almost most so called SF in cinema and TV is rubbish SF, it's usually only called SF because it's in Space or has time travel.

However there is a market for that kind of SF in book form.

People writing Historic based fiction research the period. People writing Techno-thrillers research Technology and places. People writing good detective stories research how the police do stuff, forensics, poisons (Agatha Christie probably get arrested today) and autopsies etc. Even fantasy, many of the greats spent huge amount of time researching myths, legends, folktales, long gone cultures etc.

Phyrebrat said:
Michael Crichton books I've read count
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Some do.
Niven researched and asked scientists and Engineers. He even admitted making mistakes in the first Ringworld book that should have been avoided. He was more careful with the later ones in the series. Ringworld is maybe impossible and the story involves some magic materials and spaceships. But he does keep the pure fantasy to a minimum to make the story work (unlike Star Trek or Star Wars) and there is a lot of real science. The "idea" of Ringworld is sound (it needs materials that may not exist, though) and there is a lot of science subtly used (without a "this is how it works" info dump). Niven writes fantasy too, and smuggles actually a lot of fantasy into Ringworld. But some of the more outrageous stuff "works" because it doesn't obviously conflict with reality (unless you look at it closely). Star Trek works because it's visual, but the more they explained stuff in the show the sillier it got from an SF point of view.

A.C. Clarke was very expert and even published a famous paper so that today the special distance for geostationary satellites is called the "Clarke Belt". But he ignored physics he knew in the books when it suited him.
Asimov wrote many science text books. He ignored science he knew in the books when it suited him.
In SF you got to know the rules first to decide which to break and how, otherwise it just looks silly to anyone educated, or even from point of view of internal logic.

What ever you do, don't explain how anything works! Do however make your own notes as to how each fictional (or real) tech works purely so that your use of it in the story is consistent and not contradictory.
 
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I think there's a difference between knowing/ not knowing the science and just plain using terms where you have no idea what they mean but you think that they sound cool.

For example, in a soft sci-fi space opera, if people are walking around on ships in space as though there's gravity I've got no problem if a character explains it with a throw away remark about an anti-gravity system, or even if it's not explained at all, provided that story and characters are good.
On the other hand if the author just throws in a random 'science' term - or worse, string them together, as in "They're powering up their quantum flux anti-neutrino laser!" - then I'm probably not going to carry on reading because it's just embarrassing.

And that brings me back to the idea of a glossary. IMO a sci-fi dictionary or glossary wouldn't normally be of any use to an author, even one new to sci-fi, because that means that they have a technical word that they want to use because they think it sounds 'like the sort of thing my character would say' and so they want to look up what it means. To me that's the wrong way around. The starting point should be the message that the character wants to communicate, and then if there's a word or term that the author doesn't know they can go and research it.

So if the landing gear on your character's space ship won't lower and you want the engineer to tell the captain that there's something wrong with ''the thing-that-makes-the-landing-gear-go-up-and-down' but you don't know what that the right term is, you might then go away and read up on how landing gears on planes work and find that a lot of them use some kind of hydraulics.
 
IMO: Having been in a number of writing critique groups, by far the most common mistake I've seen from non-SF writers writing SF is that they use way too much technobabble.

Technobabble works on TV and in cinema because it's not supposed to make sense. A good actor or actress can spout off a whole bunch of garbage about calibrating the phase coefficient modifier on the transwarp coils, and a good actor will look like he knows what he's talking about. When you think about it logically it may not make sense, but it doesn't have to.

SF technobabble is basically a shortcut for a TV producer to show the viewer how unfamiliar and fantastic their universe is, without using up much screen-time. A book is not limited by a 22-minutes-per-episode limit, it does not need this shortcut. Assuming you constructed a good SF universe, your reader will already know that it is unfamiliar and fantastic, without any help from technobabble.

Technobabble is extremely risky in written SF because people will simply pick apart any technical statement that you make. Larry Niven's Ringworld series (which I love) is a good example of how even a super-genre-savvy SF expert can run afoul of minutiae. After the first Ringworld, fans pointed out various impossibilities in the construction of the Ringworld, such as the fact that the Ringworld's orbit should be unstable. Since Niven was very a well educated SF writer, none of the minutiae were story-breaking. Many of his mistakes ended up being additional story fodder (the Ringworld's altitude jets in The Ringworld Engineers, etc).

An author who is not extremely-SF-savvy will not be that lucky; you will almost certainly write in something that comes off as straight-up-wrong. For example, ever since the first Star Wars, SF fans have bitched and moaned about Han Solo's "made the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs" comment. (a parsec is a unit of distance, not time) This was retconned several times in the Star Wars expanded universe but basically seems to have originated as a mistake. One or two mistakes will not prevent people from enjoying your work, but repeated mistakes will, and they will be especially bad if you write a major plot point that depends on technobabble.

But here's the thing: technobabble simply isn't all that necessary in written-word SF. Captain Quirk doesn't need to blather on about the phase coefficient modifier of his ship's transwarp coils. He can simply finesse the ship's controls with an expert touch, pushing the transwarp drive to its limits. Or something similar. For every Alastair Reynolds who pours technobabble on his readers like water, there is a William Gibson or Vernor Vinge who leaves his technologies intentionally mysterious. And that's okay - in fact, it's great!
 
Piousflea84 said:
Technobabble works on TV and in cinema because it's not supposed to make sense. A good actor or actress can spout off a whole bunch of garbage about calibrating the phase coefficient modifier on the transwarp coils, and a good actor will look like he knows what he's talking about. When you think about it logically it may not make sense,
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Yes. It doesn't work in "proper SF" books, only Cinema/TV (and barely!).

Piousflea84 said:
One or two mistakes will not prevent people from enjoying your work, but repeated mistakes will, and they will be especially bad if you write a major plot point that depends on technobabble.
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Absolutely!
 
StarWarts is similar to SF of the 30s.
It's a good idea to not use words you don't know the actual meaning of. In 'science' that can be a lot of words. *
 
Travis Woodward said:
For example, in a soft sci-fi space opera, if people are walking around on ships in space as though there's gravity I've got no problem if a character explains it with a throw away remark about an anti-gravity system, or even if it's not explained at all, provided that story and characters are good.
On the other hand if the author just throws in a random 'science' term - or worse, string them together, as in "They're powering up their quantum flux anti-neutrino laser!" - then I'm probably not going to carry on reading because it's just embarrassing.
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I think that's a good point. There's a sort of mutually-agreed shorthand here, but it's only got a limited range. So in a fantasy story, you could include a dragon and your readers (at least the sensible ones) won't think "But that's rubbish because an animal of that size would need an ecosystem to upkeep it". On the other hand, if you drop in a huge robot that speaks Finnish, people will legitimately have questions. Similarly, in crime stories the inspector often personally interviews a suspect. This, I'm told, rarely happens in real life, but it's a convention that's allowed to continue because it works for drama. In that situation, the goodness of the book comes before technical accuracy.

I think any writer of SF in any form sooner or later has to deal with the people who read it for technical accuracy. "Accurate" and "credible" aren't the same thing, and often what's seen as "accurate" is purely the extrapolation of existing tech/knowledge and doesn't allow for anything else (in the way that Mary Shelley wouldn't have known about DNA). As Piousflea says, it's often not necessary to put in the background stuff anyhow. I doubt airline pilots spend many flights discussing the principles of lift, the way I don't discuss the internal combustion engine when I drive (or even try to fix) my car.
 
Hi Toby,

Actually the one in detectivefiction that never happens but keeps getting written is the Poirot ending where all the suspects are gathered together in the room. And there's a great line in the first epp of the third season of Death in Paradise where the new detective say's "what?" And everyone else just says it's what the old detective used to do and it seemed to work!

Cheers, Greg.
 
IMO, the "really bad technobabble" tends to commit seven deadly sins, like this:

Robbie stepped on the gas. Electronuclear turbochargers spun up with the deafening roar of nanoquantumtronics, producing over nine thousand horsepower of rocket thrust. His fighter shot forward at twice the speed of light, leaving a fluffy white contrail in the asteroid belt. But it still wasn't fast enough to escape Curt's laser cannons.​

  1. Using present-day technology words for no reason. (gas pedal, turbochargers)
  2. Silly-sounding technobabble. ("nanoquantumtronics")
  3. Wrong units of measurement. ("horsepower" as a unit of rocket thrust)
  4. Impossible physics. (twice the speed of light without "warp"; contrail can't exist in a vacuum)
  5. Power level way too low. (Nine thousand horsepower is not enough)
  6. Power level way too high. (Accelerating instantly to twice the speed of light)
  7. Contradictory terms. (speed-of-light reference reminds you that lasers only travel at the speed of light)
 
Ray McCarthy said:
Not really, it depends how getting A to B faster than Light is achieved.
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I don't think the method has any relevance, whether we are talking about proposed Alcubiere Drives, gateways, CTC's or any other speculative mode of "travel".

If you move FTL (when considering Local Reference Frames) then to some observer somewhere you move back down your own world line - this is time travel whether in the normally appreciated sense or not.

Essentially we are adding a physical observer to the idea of a Tachyon telephone - any travel that precedes information exchange is time travel - it doesn't matter how you try and get around the physical movement.
 
SilentRoamer said:
If you move FTL (when considering Local Reference Frames) then to some observer somewhere you move back down your own world line - this is time travel whether in the normally appreciated sense or not.
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Not for some methods. I'm not sure about Warp Bubbles. Relativistic time differential only applies to normal travel, up to and including speed of light. You can't travel faster than light in NORMAL space. Tachyions probably don't exist, but if they did, then they are travelling faster than light in normal space so would be moving back in time. Which is why it's unlikely they exist.
A wormhole only involves time travel if one end can be moved. If we consider fixed wormholes (or star gates / Portals / jump drives which are all zero transit time wormholes usually, unless a fictional hyper space is used) then there is no time travel.

Probably only FTL in the sense of hypothetical (likely fictional) Tachyions involves time travel backwards. All normal travel until light speed takes less time for traveller than observer (zero time at speed of light) the faster you go. So that is a specialised time travel.
 
Ray McCarthy said:
Not for some methods. I'm not sure about Warp Bubbles. Relativistic time differential only applies to normal travel, up to and including speed of light. You can't travel faster than light in NORMAL space. Tachyions probably don't exist, but if they did, then they are travelling faster than light in normal space so would be moving back in time. Which is why it's unlikely they exist.
A wormhole only involves time travel if one end can be moved. If we consider fixed wormholes (or star gates / Portals / jump drives which are all zero transit time wormholes usually, unless a fictional hyper space is used) then there is no time travel.

Probably only FTL in the sense of hypothetical (likely fictional) Tachyions involves time travel backwards. All normal travel until light speed takes less time for traveller than observer (zero time at speed of light) the faster you go. So that is a specialised time travel.
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No I am afraid you are wrong. You are making an assumption of something called Universal Time and ignoring the fact the Universe is 4 Dimensional and not 3 Dimensional. Everything observed happens at some point in the past, sure at local levels we don't even notice but that's only because we are macro beings. If you can travel from A to B over any significant distance using any method AT ALL that involves the same space times at both points being connected then either they are connected temporally and you are assuming Universal Time (which is an accepted form of geometric topology but only in specific instances) or else there is some form of time travel.

This isn't my opinion it's a mathematical fact based on the current understanding of the laws of physics.

Basically C is the limit, you violate C in any way from any reference frame and you violate Time. Light loves being an invariant.
 
I suppose if the endpoint of some Instant Teleportation tech were not only another Galaxy but one outside the Hubble Volume there would likely be no causality inference.
 
SilentRoamer said:
Basically C is the limit, you violate C in any way from any reference frame and you violate Time. Light loves being an invariant.
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This depends on how you define the phrase "You violate Time".

Any violation of c from any reference frame will, by definition, violate causality from that reference frame. If the Priceline Negotiator starts a self-destruct countdown, and 1 minute later his starship explodes... if the starship is moving faster-than-c toward any reference frame, an observer in that reference frame will witness the explosion prior to the countdown. This is, by definition, a causality violation.

However, it is much less clear whether a violation of relative causality necessarily leads to "time paradoxes" such as the Closed Time-Like Circuit (CTC) or Grandmother Paradox (GP).

In the simply-defined case of tachyons (a particle that must exceed c in all inertial reference frames), grandmother paradoxes are guaranteed - all you need is a tachyon bouncing between two other particles that move slightly-slower-than-light. That tachyon will bounce back to its sender before the initial message was sent - a classic Grandmother Paradox.

Wormholes are tricky because wormhole physics is not well defined, and there are no logical limitations on how wormholes could interact with time. A single wormhole could connect "Earth, year 2015" to "Galactic Core, year 2015 (Earth reference frame)"... or it could connect "Earth, year 2015" to "Galactic Core, year 1,000,000BC (Earth reference frame)". The latter would absolutely represent a time paradox, because you could then fire a photon torpedo at Earth and destroy the planet a million years before you were born.

Requiring a wormhole to go outside the Hubble volume (ie Observable Universe) doesn't prevent the possibility of time paradoxes, or even the possibility of FTL travel within the Observable Universe. All you have to do is take one wormhole from Earth to Universe B, then take a second wormhole from Universe B to Epsilon Eridani. At that point you're well within photon torpedo range of your grandmother.

IIRC there's a Stephen Hawking hypothesis out there that says that closed time-like circuits (CTCs) may inherently define themselves out of existence because they have infinitely high energy and therefore infinitely low probability. (I'm not quoting exactly; this is my limited understanding of the physics) No matter what type of FTL travel you propose, if there is any possibility that a virtual particle intersects with its own past, the probability of that particle history will become zero so it won't happen. This could allow an infinitely large network of "wormholes", but their space-time reference frames would seem "infinitely finely-tuned" so that it is impossible to use wormholes to interact with your own past.
 
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