Six admitted laypersons set out to prove that “You Don’t Have to Science to Do Science Fiction” on Friday 4PM, at the Sci-Fi Literature track, Hyatt Embassy AB. Terry Fredrick Maggert moderated a distinguished crew of authors as they contemplated related fundamental questions. Panelists Marc Alan Edelheit, A.J. Hartley, Bethanne Kim, S.M. Stirling, and Trisha J. Wooldridge examined science versus non-science and hard science fiction versus space opera, or whether it’s nobler to land somewhere in the middle?
Wooldridge spoke of a difference in tone in hard science fiction, more of a thought experiment than space opera which instead plays with science. Stirling compared alternate history’s examination of time travel as not concerned with science-based theories, but rather with time travel’s effects.
Kim, who has written in the 1631 alternate universe series created by the late Eric Flint, remarked that technology was used to spread knowledge and improve life. “If we understood science [which is] perhaps difficult” we might pay more attention to details like expiration dates on foods. [Cyclospora, anyone?]
Hartley commented that the difference in hard science fiction and space opera, at least to him, is that space opera relies on magic most of the time. It needs the plot to work out with science that is plausible as opposed to science fiction where the science must work and does matter. If the science is wrong, you lose the faith of the reader.
Edelheit agreed. Science fiction is tech, but in other books, tech, for the characters, is magic. Maggert referred to this phenomenon as “handwavium.”
Hartley noted the fine example of a non-tech solution to one writer’s scientific challenges, the “babel fish” from Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It is, of course, nonsense, but it immediately solves the problem of communication between characters who speak different languages. [And not an atom was harmed in the process although intergalactic road construction did raise some challenges. Atlanta beware!]
