I'm a science buff, and recently I've been struck by how many films, TV shows and novels have started to showcase more of the actual science end of sci-fi stories. Films like Interstellar and Gravity take lots of actual physics into account while still delivering emotionally impactful stories--yes, they "tweaked" the science in some places to fit the story, but like Mark Twain said, "Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please."
This has been sage advice for me as I've written stories such as The Phantom in the Deep, The Immortal Game, and the soon-to-come The Sol Ascendancy. The latter involves not only science, but complex political issues that are inherent with First Contact scenarios.
Soon, Syfy will be airing a television series called Leviathan Wakes, based of the acclaimed novel by James S.A. Corey. It's kind of a space opera (a la Star Wars) with lots of mystery, intrigue, and action, yet with the grounding in actual science that many space operas lack. To me, this is a welcome change to the usual laser gun pew-pew-pew fair, where the action eclipses all the complexities of space and time. Get too close to a planet with a city-sized ship, and you suffer the gravity bow-wave and are pulled in. If you eat food in zero-gravity, it all tastes like wax. Try to send a message to Jupiter, you suffer a forty-minute time delay.
These little details help immerse us in the genre just as the mentioning of folded steel in a well-made sword helps ground us in a fantasy setting.
And let's not forget the moral dilemmas that stem from adhering to a science-y science fiction tale. I mean, where else can you ask yourself these questions?
- What happens if a computer virus remains on the Internet for decades, centuries, and eventually becomes a convoluted string of code that emerges a self-aware subroutine in the Internet? Does it have rights?
- What happens in a future where cloning is accepted, and someone decides to marry their clone?
- What happens if we actually find proof of an alien civilization on a planet 170 light-years away? We'll NEVER be able to contact them, nor probably even reach them any time soon. How does this affect our culture? Does it reshape religion? Just knowing that the aliens are out there, living their lives, does it change us dramatically? Do the world's physicists and astroengineers immediately shift gears and try to refocus all major science projects with the express intent of making contact? Do we have an obligation to contact them?
- If I am able to travel back in time and prevent something horrible from happening, do I stop it? Is my obligation to humanity or to maintaining the timeline? Are they one and the same?
In any of these scenarios above, it only helps to get closer to the science that permits these questions to be asked. We need to know about tachyon particles in a time-travel story. We need to understand how coding works in a story about artificial intelligence. The reader must have a grasp of the physics in the real world he/she occupies if he/she is going to fully understand the dilemma being presented.
Some may consider these pieces of detail extraneous, but I for one can't really get immersed in a sci-fi story unless I see that the authors at least respect the science they're dealing with, because within that science comes the accumulated history of every moral dilemma we've ever faced as a species. There's no human story to the Manhattan Project's scientists if you don't mention the lengths the physicists went to in order to create the bomb in the first place.
Does scientific accuracy always make a better story. No. But it always makes a story better.
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