So a rather big part of writing Science-Fiction or Science Fantasy is, surprisingly or not, science. Now some authors go the hand-wavy route and you get things like "Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman." There is no real science, just a covering of words and terms and concepts that are associated with science due to either being so new that they are still being handled by research or simply still unproven. The other side of the scale, those scientists who do their research and get it very right, is exemplified by Jules Verne. Yes this nineteenth century man got a lot wrong about the inventions and discoveries of the coming century but he predicted skyscrapers, solar sails, skywriting, Skype, and most famously electric submarines all decades before they became a part of the culture as they are now. He did all this with a basic understanding of Newtonian Physics, market forces, and the imagination of a small boy.
Being a scientist myself I lean hard toward the Vernian tradition of Science-Ficiton. I spend many hours and day researching the smallest details. Some were fairly easy to track down if not apply. There is a vicious alien virus eating the iron out of the hero's blood? Call up the local ND/MD and ask what the symptoms would look like. Faster than light travel is still trickier of course. I copped out of the more complex tech and went for wormholes but was still able to find current research that allowed me to hypothesize a functional wormhole generation device.
Over this series of articles I will detail where I got the inspiration for many of the science points in my book "Dying Embers" and where I just wave my hands and let the fiction part of Science-Fiction do it's work.
Being a scientist myself I lean hard toward the Vernian tradition of Science-Ficiton. I spend many hours and day researching the smallest details. Some were fairly easy to track down if not apply. There is a vicious alien virus eating the iron out of the hero's blood? Call up the local ND/MD and ask what the symptoms would look like. Faster than light travel is still trickier of course. I copped out of the more complex tech and went for wormholes but was still able to find current research that allowed me to hypothesize a functional wormhole generation device.
Over this series of articles I will detail where I got the inspiration for many of the science points in my book "Dying Embers" and where I just wave my hands and let the fiction part of Science-Fiction do it's work.
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