This is a wonderful topic, and were I not so completely exhausted from the past month, I would love to discuss it at length with you. My biggest problem is that I can't not have hard science in anything I write -- well, anything with a plot, anyway (which is more than three-quarters of my stories) -- and if I write science, it has to be as accurate as I can make it. This has led to some really incredible migraines when trying to reconcile (for example) Stargate wink-wink-nudge-nudge science with actual astrophysics (and don't get me started with the language) or George Lucas' playing fast and loose with stellar distances.
I cut my teeth on Analog and learned to read with Clarke and Heinlein and Niven so technobabble comes easy, but if it isn't as accurate as I can make it, then as far as I'm concerned, it's not worth writing.
There are stories with hard SF themes that end 'happily', though I can't at the moment name names, it's too late and I'm too tired. The best ones are the ones that integrate the science into the story so it becomes the background, the expected, so you're not reading the story for the SF, but the SF is almost another character in the story, a background red shirt, if you will; essential but unobtrusive. Well, unless the story is about the science, of course.
I'm rambling, sorry. Must go to bed, it's been a Monday. Thanks for the topic, though!
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branchandroot
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Date: 2010-04-27 02:46 am (UTC)I cut my teeth on Analog and learned to read with Clarke and Heinlein and Niven so technobabble comes easy, but if it isn't as accurate as I can make it, then as far as I'm concerned, it's not worth writing.
There are stories with hard SF themes that end 'happily', though I can't at the moment name names, it's too late and I'm too tired. The best ones are the ones that integrate the science into the story so it becomes the background, the expected, so you're not reading the story for the SF, but the SF is almost another character in the story, a background red shirt, if you will; essential but unobtrusive. Well, unless the story is about the science, of course.
I'm rambling, sorry. Must go to bed, it's been a Monday. Thanks for the topic, though!