I have avoided writing science fiction like the plague. I'm not a techy, sciencey kind of person. (I managed to fulfill my science requirement for my MFA--BARELY--and I thought having a science requirement was stupid. *grumbles about what it did to her GPA*)

I enjoy and read quite a bit of science fiction (not Dune but others). I love David Weber and Eric Flint. That kind of thing. But the second you stick in some technobabble, which they all do, my eyes glaze over and I scan until I get past it. I know darn well I can't write it. *imagines stringing together some totally meaningless syllables*

Someone help me out here, please. Planning for the next WotF, is it possible to write science fiction sans technobabble? Or fake it? (like that scene in When Harry Met Sally *snickers*)

George Orwell's 1984 is a fine example of a science fiction story that's mostly lacking in gadgets and technobabble. The imaginative social circumstances are a consequence that the gadgets of Big Brother cause. What a brilliant literary trope Orwell invented there. Surveillance apparatus representing the indifferent authority of totalitarianism and its incessant invasion of privacy, the symbolic antagonism of the story.

Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451 is another science fiction story based purely upon imaginative social premises. Virtually gadgetless, the story is as much about how television destroys culture as it is about censorship consequently arising in response to fears of intellectualism.

I've wracked my brains to come up with a female author's gadgetless hard science fiction story, one where the imaginative premise derives from social circumstances with a female protagonist. It's a wide open arena. Lots of potential there for a breakthrough story. Perhaps in the vein of patrimony going to totalitarian extremes due to exigent circumstances? The tryanny of biological destiny is a significant player in world and cultural circumstances.

quote:

---

I've wracked my brains to come up with a female author's gadgetless hard science fiction story...

---

Oh, dear. OH, dear... *invokes the holy name of Elizabeth Moon in order to control herself--takes a deep breath*

There. All better.

Edit: I'd avoid the term scifi as many in the field consider the term on the order of an expletive. It gets so confusing who froths at the mouth at scifi and who does at SF that I stick to science fiction. Personally, I don't care but I've seen people get very excited on the subject.

Since Mr. Card is one of the judges of WotF, I'd say there's a good chance that the "black box" might slip through. A friend of mine recently pointed out that since science fiction types accept FTL drives they really should accept any old thing since that is blatantly impossible--but they're funny like that. You could be on a low tech planet and mention "oh dear this would be so much easier if we had a myhsterious black box" and then a ship (avoiding the horrible term "starship" which is considered a no-no by many) lands--and something horrible happens.

The whole patriarchal thing is pretty out-dated, by the way. It was big news in the 1970's but a bit done by now. Occasionally I'll touch on it in a story--that a female leader has to work harder to be accepted, that sort of thing--but mostly gender issues are too done to be anything but boring as a central conflict imo.

[This message has been edited by JeanneT (edited June 16, 2008).]

I've thought a lot of genre SF will go on and on about how something is supposed to work. Only in rare cases does it not manage to be one of three things. (1) a barely-intelligible auctorial explanation that stops the story dead, or (2) characters explaining things to each other that they by rights should (a) already know, or (b) do not need to know---which also stops the story dead, or (3) meaningless-to-the-reader words and phrases.

While I think it might be easier to weave that sort of expertise into a fantasy, you might find a way to work it into a quasi-SF story or a genre-bending story. The Time Traveler's Wife is hard to classify, with elements of mainstream, SF and romance, but it was quite effective. (I hated the ending, though.) The time-traveling bit was explained away by blaming it on a DNA problem; that was no explanation at all and the story probably would have been better without one.

I think I'm not understanding your point -- I don't understand how something can have a strong technical basis without the science. Dick Francis's books work because he DOES know his subject so thoroughly.

Her fantasy is considered epic--and her breakthrough novel Sheepfarmer's Daughter was indeed a fantasy. It had a strong miliary theme, however. She has a military background and much of her work has a military theme.

As with fantasy settings, you can't leave everything up to the reader's imagination. Give them something to hook their teeth into, but it doesn't have to be a detailed technical whatever.

OSC does it with the antigrav in Ender's Game. He gives you enough elements of the early part of the story to understand that this story takes place in the future. Then when he gives you a force field that lets the kids enter into a zero grav chamber, it's not a big stretch.

Madeline L'Engle did a blend of fantasy and sci-fi in Wrinkle in Time, where they travel to another world, meet an alien, fight the bad guy, etc.

I wouldn't get too hung up on the supposed no-nos in SF land, though. I hear that in a couple of your posts. If you get hung up on what you can't do, you're going to find yourself feeling constrained, and a constrained writer is often one with writer's block or anger issues. (that's a joke, by the way.)

Speed of Dark was pointed out is soft science fiction and in spite of extrinsic's comment that is female technobabble-less writing, it has a fair amount about the computer technology that the protag works with.

As far as my being hung up on what I can't do, if there is something I feel I can't do I will probably seek advice on it. Sorry that bothers you although the only no-no of science fiction I recall mentioning is what I consider the silly debate over whether it is called scifi and SF. Some people get quite excited on the subject so I simply avoid either term.

Thanks for the suggestion, Kathleen. I'm not big on gadgets in science fiction, but I'll give that some thought.

Spoiler Alert: does anyone know the book with an old lady who is left behind when the colonists abandon a planet, and she is quite happy to stay put alone? She discovers an alien race and introduces them to humanity... I'd love to get ahold of it again (sorry JeanneT for hijacking)

Did Wolverton strike again? yeah, I thought so.

quote:

---

(avoiding the horrible term "starship" which is considered a no-no by many)

---

Nothing about your posts bother me, except the assumption that something about your posts bother me. (another joke, by the way)

My suggestion for writing SF without having to invent technobabble is to write soft SF and allude to/assume certain things about available technologies. For example, faster-than-light (FTL) drives are one standard trope in science fiction. We all know it's incredibly unlikely, but we're geeks and continue to hold out hope that we're one brilliant discovery away from being able to jet about the universe like we do the country.

In my opinion, the SF that works best is the SF that takes today's problems, jets them into the future, and then figures out how people then handle the same problems, but with more gadgetry involved (usually the themes end up being the same: Do the right thing because it's the right thing to do, love hurts, some people are evil, family matters, etc. etc.)

That said--I'm going to do a science fiction piece anyway. Will it be a success? Hard to say but it can't hurt to try. If I can get it to the point of being any good it will be my NEXT quarter's submission for WotF.

I do like to plan ahead.

MrsBrown, that is Elizabeth Moon's Nebula nominated Remnant Population. A great novel, in my opinion.

Edit: Oops, I see Kathleen already answered that.

Consider a story written for our time. We don't explain the inner workings of auto engines, how lights brighten, how radios work, the energies of the microwave.
Instead, we mention the car driving by, stopping at a gas station and sticking the nozel in and waiting for you money to run out, placing our food in a box, hitting a couple buttons to get hot food, flipping a trip.

the only difference between a modern story is that the car might float a foot above the ground rather than on wheels, the fuel might be a soft black cube stuck in a covered box on the side of the car, one waves a hand in the air to turn on lights, one sticks food in a box and food to be eaten hot is hot, food to be eaten cold remains cold.

One simply discribes the scene and not worry about why it works.
If it is plausible, go with it. Everything mentioned in my example is plausible, by the way.

Because of this delay problem, science fiction authors prefer to put things in the future, As far in the future as needed to tell the story. The problem with authors of the 30s through the 80s, is that they figured the year 2000 was so far off that their predictions of how the world would would have more than enough time to come true. Consider computer technology of MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS by Heinlein.

Authors learned that by placing things off earth, just about anything can go. Parallel universes become possible and one can play things very losely, creating alternative histories and futures.

To be science fiction, The science cannot be pulled from the story and it hold together.
Hard science fiction is where some technology or some cultural trend is pushed to its limit, and then one examines the results.

Soft science fiction is basically an idiot of the future in trouble.

Science fantasy, such as Star Wars, uses some scientific explanation for magic to exist.

Other science fiction classifications have developed over the recent years, but these give you a guide.

Edit: Although I don't quite know what that has to do with writing technobabble. I'm acquainted with the sub-genre of science fiction, very well acquainted as a matter of fact. Perhaps something I said gave the wrong idea. I just have to figure out how a pure NON-geek can write the stuff--something short of the disappearing into a magical forest thing. *shudder*

And, yes, MrsBrown, at least to some degree Mr. Wolverton has struck again.

Elizabeth Moon writes good SF in my opinion, having read one of her Vatta books. IIRC she doesn't compete with geeky authors. She's got a future universe with space travel and competes as an author using her military background. The story is about how real, competitive people and families might live, love and fight in a future of star travel, and how military tactics might be with space ships, fancy weapons and the three-dimensional, zero gravity battle-field of space. At least one battle gets resolved with some fancy tactics that would only work in space--she's used her military experience to think it through, and that's a pleasure to read.

The thing with the scientific speculation is that it can be as outlandish as you please, as long as the story lives within the wild rules of science you invent. The imagined science has to be consistent. So if there's no gravity, for example, the characters in the bar can't down a drink. The Vatta book I read passed this test, and I expect Moon's other books do too. (Of course, as well, the scientific speculation shouldn't be used to introduce a deus ex machina, but you know that.)

As a counter-example, there's an awful Star Trek episode where Picard finds an ancient machine and, instead of letting the nasty bad time travellers get it, returns it to its rightful owner. The huge plot hole is that the time travellers are with him when he finds it--having discovered its location, why don't they just hop back in time and beat him to it? By not answering this question the story falls apart even though, initially, we accept the time travel.

Star Trek usually gets its science consistent, so this kind of mistake is rare. The writers keep a huge backstory of invented science that future stories have to be consistent with. Mostly I enjoy it, but I have to admit there are times when Geordy is explaining to Data the quasi-intervection of the anti-matter crystals and the subspace interpolar bypass and even my eyes glaze over.

If you can read and enjoy SF and not care about skipping the geeky stuff, surely you're proving to yourself that SF can be written without the technobabble. One good, oft-quoted example is Heinlein's "The door dilated." It isn't technobabble, but it establishes a futuristic setting at a stroke.

I also enjoy Vatta's War. Moon knows her stuff when it comes to the military.

But she also has a substantial scientific background. She has a BA in Biology from Rice University as well as graduate work in the field, worked with computers during her stint in the Marines, used to ghost write medical articles for her doctor husband, and is quite a conservationist. This background shows in her science fiction. She's quite as geeky as she needs to be and is more than capable of competing on that ground.

Edit: Ha. I was wrong. Her BA in HISTORY is from Rice University. Her BA in BIOLOGY is from the University of Texas. Poor woman.

Melissa Scott (Dreaming Metal and others, cyberpunk)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_Scott_%28writer%29

Ursula K Le Guin (Philosophical SF)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin

Anne McCaffrey (Singing Ships)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_McCaffrey

Brian Aldiss (Non-Stop, The Dark Light Years)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Aldiss

Interestingly, while most great SF authors include science in their education, I don't see a strong science education in Heinlein's bio. As you know, he uses SF to explore sex, morality and politics. His military experience shows, too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein

I don't think a science background is mandatory for SF. After all, nobody knows how FTL works, nor how a door might dilate, so you are the science expert in your own world. If the science is logically cohesive, suspension of disbelief will be willing.

Indeed, as I write, I become convinced that SF stories that are rich in character and culture come from those who have studied history, politics, language and the arts. The science just gives the author a completely blank canvas to paint on.

Cheers,
Pat