watervole | Science in Science Fiction

interesting poll

Seconded. The things that annoy me about science fiction are much more likely (not surprisingly, given my educational/research background) to be errors in, kind of, social science: like a society set hundreds or thousands of years in the future which just happens to operate under the same rules for gendered behaviour and sexual interaction as the society of its writer. Babylon 5 loses a lot of credibility for me because it claims that gay marriage has been legalized, but all its characters are normatively gendered for 1990s Americans (not only are there no masculine women or feminine men, but there are no trans or intersex characters), and there are no visible same-sex relationships. It's as big a plot hole as a mistake in Newtonian physics, but (for me) with the added factor that I wouldn't spot a plot hole in Newtonian physics, but I would spot anachronistic heteronormativity.

One of the things that's always bugged me about DS9 is that the women of almost all races (eg Klingons, Vorta) wear costumes revealing secondary sexual characteristics, more jewelry than equivalent men & facial make-up.

It's always bothered me that every single Vulcan woman we've ever seen has worn red lipstick.

On one Vulcan woman she might be a Vulcan Goth, or something: but every one? It's no more probable than green lipstick would be on a human woman. (Come to that, I've not found any logical explanation why Vulcan women would be wearing lipstick, either, but wearing it they are.)

Seconded, absolutely. Likewise an alien world which just happens to resemble a past period of human history in almost every way except a few minor plot-coupon-related points.

like a society set hundreds or thousands of years in the future which just happens to operate under the same rules for gendered behaviour and sexual interaction as the society of its writer

But given the fluidity of social mores, there's no reason why those rules shouldn't be in operation in the future. We're currently living in a relatively progressive period, but that doesn't mean there can't be a regression to rigid heteronormativity just around the corner. I anticipate precisely that kind of reversal sometime in this century. Round about the time the oil runs out.

Though I'd agree that 'the rules' in the future are unlikely to be the exactly the same in the future as they are today, deciding what the rules of the future might be entails appreciating and evaluating the various factors - economic, ideological, religious, whatever - that set the parameters of permissivity, which as far as I'm aware are not very clearly understood. Certainly not as well as the laws of physics. There is, presumably, some kind of formula that could tell us what kind of level of, say, gender diversity we might expect under particular socio-economic conditions, but I've not heard of anyone getting as far as writing it down.

deciding what the rules of the future might be entails appreciating and evaluating the various factors - economic, ideological, religious, whatever - that set the parameters of permissivity, which as far as I'm aware are not very clearly understood. Certainly not as well as the laws of physics

Yes, I take your point on that one - it's reasonable to set the laws of physics as a framework in any fiction, whether set in the future or the past, and an infraction of those laws is a different kind of error from an implausibly-gendered society. But when you say -

given the fluidity of social mores, there's no reason why those rules shouldn't be in operation in the future. We're currently living in a relatively progressive period, but that doesn't mean there can't be a regression to rigid heteronormativity just around the corner.

Hmm. I mean, I agree that there's not a line of progression in terms of gender/sexual expression which can be extrapolated - that there isn't an autonomous realm of gender development outside of social/technological/economic conditions. But there is some science fiction (and also historical fiction) which just posits an ahistorical, asocial difference between men and women - which hasn't considered at all how, say, a change in the gendered division of labour might have affected the (stereo)typical modes of expressing gender. I suppose what bothers me is a total lack of awareness of gendered behaviour as socially constructed.

It depends on the genre and the kind of science fiction to an extent: most European/American fiction set in the present day only represents straight characters - and vastly overrepresents young, white, thin, wealthy, attractive characters - so it's a bit unfair to expect all science fiction to show more social diversity. But there are some contexts - like B5's passing reference to gay marriage - where I start thinking 'so where are all the queers, then?' Or Gerald once read a science-fiction novel where they genetically eliminate all homosexuality in the set-up to the story, so that the writer could talk about the future of heterosexuality without having to be bothered by, well, the existence of people like me. It's that kind of casual dismissal of social realities which affect characters' lives as much as the existence or otherwise of FTL travel that bothers me.

Yes!! I'm with you on that point - I can happily suspend disbelief all the way to Alpha Centauri for hard science, but a society that doesn't make sense - or is too obviously and sloppily based on a historical one - grates.

Of course, I've got a Space 1999 book coming out, so I'm kind of stuck with scientific nonsense...

I'm more bothered when a book is inconsistent, rather than just unscientific- if you're going to bend the rules, bend them consistently.

They're publishing Space 1999 books?

I'm more bothered when a book is inconsistent, rather than just unscientific- if you're going to bend the rules, bend them consistently.

Agreed. I mean, if you invent a McGuffin, then you need to think about the impact that's going to have, not just in the immediate situation, but the applications of it, and how that will affect society and so on -- and also, don't forget, 100 pages later, that the McGuffin exists...

They're publishing Space 1999 books?

Yep, Powys Books in the US, who are also publishing novels based on The Prisoner.

I'd like to point out that my reaction to flawed science depends a lot on the rest of the book. It can be enough with one bad howler if it happens to be crucial to the plot and the book tries to be serious, while any number of totally ludicrous things can be acceptable if they fit the mode of the book. For example, Niven's The Hole Man is crap these days because it depends totally on a particular bit of physics that has since been proven wrong, while the Lensman series gets away with an enormous amount of utterly ridiculous physics by being way-over-the-top gung-ho action-adventure (never mind that planets moving at six times the speed of light are miles beyond believable, using them as weapons is cool).

How seriously the reader is expected to take it all can make a large differnce, I agree.

Hmm, well with the second question it all depends how much "big scientific fudge" there is. If it's sf, I would pretty much ALWAYS expect some kind of explanation for those types of things (or, if you refer to a matter such as a violation of Newtonian physics - a nice although not very realistic alternative). As to the question about scientific errors - if they're very minor errors that are more peeves than anything else, they can be looked over, however if they're major errors it's not as easy to turn a blind eye towards.

Agree with

gair that the things that bother readers are often their particular area of expertise, and are thus not readily predictable. I'm thrown out by errors in biology/medicine, particularly the casual use of words such as 'virus' or 'mutation' to explain anything & everything.

A radioactive airborne virus!

Sorry.

Oh Gods, I remember how that one made me flinch at the time!

You don't know how many times I deleted that phrase when typing my reply...

For me it's not the absolute number of errors so much as the reason for the errors. If it's one of the genre conventions that exists in order to allow certain plots to happen even though everyone including the author knows that the science doesn't work (at least by our current understanding), that's not a problem. If it looks as if the errors are there because the author doesn't *realise* that they're errors, book meets wall.

This was one of the issues with A Terrible Novel. For example: there are ways around a small asteroid (if I recall correctly) having its own atmosphere. Some of those ways involve stuff like manipulation of gravity, which in itself is a bit of a no-no in current day science. But manipulation of gravity is a standard genre convention, and one of the pieces of genre furniture you're allowed as part of your interior decoration scheme so long as the rest of the science holds up.

But when you get an author who thinks that you can have a colony on the surface of a Uranus which has somehow acquired a surface, along with Earth-normal gravity and sundry other things it doesn't have in *this* universe, your disbelief suspenders go twang. Add in having a couple of small galaxies shrunk and then shoehorned in between Uranus and Earth instead of being outside our galaxy where they're supposed to be, and the disbelief suspenders snap and flick you somewhere painful.

It only takes a couple of such errors to convince me that the author is not familiar with either science or science fiction. And if they haven't already convinced me by then that they can still write a good sf story in spite of this handicap (and it *is* a handicap), they're probably not going to get any further chance to do so. Prior experience suggests to me that I cannot trust such an author to be an enjoyable read, because they're going to have their characters doing stupid, impossible things that don't make sense to me.

And a couple of pertinent comments have been posted while I was composing that. :-) I'm with

lonemagpie about the importance of consistency, and lack of consistency is one of the things that will throw me out of the story and make me think that it's Lack Of Authorial Clue rather than deliberate bending of rules. And

cdybedahl's comment is something I partly agree with - partly, because I find that I give a lot more leeway to stories whose science was plausible at the time it was written. Doc Smith's cheerful use of the aether doesn't bug me, while it would be book-meets-wall time in a story written today that wasn't a deliberate homage/parody/whatever of old-style space opera.

If the plot and the characters are interesting, but the scientific errors are horrendous, I won't stop reading. After all, I will want to mock the book with authority, and furthermore, after a while, scientific errors just become amusing.

With enormous scientific errors perpetrated For The Sake of the Story, I think it's best (unless they're genre-conventional scientific errors, like ftl travel or peculiarly humanoid aliens, or time travel) to get them over with right at the start of the story, just like Enormous Coincidences.

(Even peculiarly-humanoid aliens bug me a bit: it's the only thing that really annoyed me about C.J.Cherryh's atevi series. Non-human humanoid intelligent species are just too fantastically improbable to swallow without a bit of a choke, though if you're C.J.Cherryh and you have a very good reason for wanting me to swallow - as she did - I'll gulp it down and enjoy the rest.)

I didn't answer the third question because it depends on the size of the errors and their relationship to the plot. If they're just small, inconsequential ones, then I can just gloss over them. But something big, without which the plot would collapse, I might consider giving up.

That said, though, if the thing's good enough, I don't always notice.

For the second question, it depends on what you're violating Newtonian physics with, since it doesn't, technially speaking, always hold up.

I'm assuming errors that have some effect on the plot.

Assume that I mean Newtonian physics in the region where relativity is not a concern.

I just like being picky :)

I was about to make exactly that point about Newtonian physics -- there are excellent stories where an aspect of the plot hinges on quantum or relativistic effects.

Also, I'd echo much of what was said in the comments from

julesjones.

It depends greatly on how it's done. I generally don't mind if an author postulates that a way has been found to do something we currently believe to be impossible or incredibly difficult (eg. breaking the lightspeed barrier or uploading your mind to a computer), as long as it's done in a plausible way and the consequences are properly explored. What annoys me is when the author makes elementary mistakes because he doesn't know basic science, hasn't done his research, or can't be bothered to stay within the rules of the universe he set up at the beginning of the story.

or can't be bothered to stay within the rules of the universe he set up at the beginning of the story.

Amen. With SF, you have a certain amount of time at the start of the story to let your reader know what "the rules" of this universe are, the things they're going to hang their suspenders of disbelief on. If the author then goes on to violate one of those rules, it's like someone sawing off the branch that they're sitting on -- it all goes crash.

Orson Scott Card does exactly this with Xenocide and Children Of The Mind where he decides to ignore relativity. It undermines the previous two books in which he was quite disciplined about the science. I kept on reading the books because the characters were excellent and I wanted to know what would happen, but the mental crash had already happened.

I tend to draw a distinction between 'science' and 'technology'. FTL, matter transmission, artificial gravity etc might be implausible, but they're not in the same league as asteroids with a breathable atmosphere or one species evolving into another overnight. Given sufficient bafflegab, technology can be made to do just about anything demanded by the plot, but the rest of the universe has to go by the book. Having said that, a rattling good yarn that gives scientific plausibility the finger (and knows damn well that it is doing so) can surmount any disbelief-suspension barrier by being recategorised as fantasy, in which anything goes so long as it goes well.

I think it really depends on whether the rest of the novel - the literary nuts and bolts, the characters, plot, ideas and imagery, the actual writing - are enough to carry the reader over the shaky science. And that's a reader-by-reader thing. Eric Frank Russell's science was as shaky as 1970s TVSF, but the humour in his stories gets me by it.

Now of course, I'm a character junkie - if I like the characters enough, I can overlook any amount of scientific/technological nonsense (and plot holes, and... you get the picture). Someone else, when given a rattling good yarn or mystery, will overlook cardboard characters (of which there are a lot in classic SF, let us be honest).

Oh yeah, one other thing that always bugs me- Habitable planets or worlds that only have one climate. I.e. there's a spaceport and everything else is jungle, or desert, or ice... (Yeah, I know that, say, Mars, is all desert, but it's not bloody habitable, is it?)

Star Wars does this a lot, but I don't mind it there cos that's fantasy from the outset.

(Obviously if the writer says it has been technologically arranged or terraformed to be that way for a reason, I might let them off with it)

And only one time zone, which is the same time zone that all visiting spaceships are on (and anyone offplanet they communicate with by ftl radio). Sometimes there are good reasons for an entire planet to be on a single time zone, but more usually it's because it hasn't occurred to the author that it might be the middle of the night in the city on the other side of the planet.

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