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Post by anonymous on May 13, 2019 17:54:18 GMT
I'm having trouble getting the motivation to start writing Hard-SF type stories because I am worried that in the next decade there will be a huge black swan (science-rewriting event) that will make the whole story ridiculous. I want to write about futuristic technology, but 9 times out of 10 the actual technology in the future will be much different, if it even exists at all. For example, I want to write about a fusion powerplant, but it is not even know if we can actually use fusion for energy production. What should I do?
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Post by airc777 on May 13, 2019 22:41:09 GMT
Well, you can either decide to start writing or decide to not start writing. Assuming you have the free time to write, and enough of an inspiration for a story, and you enjoy the act of writing enough to actually commit to it then this isn't a question of can you do something it's a question of what the outcome will be. If you don't start writing at all you won't publish a book and you have a zero percent chance of making millions of dollars from your intellectual property. If you do start writing maybe you aren't successful and don't end up making millions of dollars from your intellectual property, but there is at least a greater then zero percent chance that you could. So if you can write at all you should do it. If you are looking at this as more of a question of is it worth the time that you could be spending on other hobbies and occupations making money, well that brings into question do you have the time in the first place? You're here on a forum asking about it, presumably not on your phone when you should be working or studying, so you appear to have at least some free time. So then its only a question about the context of your post, will an unforeseen advancement in science suddenly render the entirety of your intellectual property without any merit? So then you have to ask how central to your plot are the specifics of the quantum mechanics or general relativity? Could you take the same plot structure and simply re frame it to fit more recent discoveries when available? I think you could because I doubt just hard science without any character studies or political intrigue or other humanizing elements would sell well. Unless your intent is to anthropomorphize quarks and photons and such? If you haven't already you should totally read The Martian by Andy Weir. It has it's flaws but it gets enough right that most of the hard SF enthusiasts are willing to suspend disbelief over things like martian wind speeds and soil perchlorates and it was generally well received by everyone, and he probably made millions of dollars.
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Post by anonymous on May 14, 2019 0:42:15 GMT
I didn't say anything about making money. I only want to write for my own enjoyment. But I am always apprehensive about writing farther and farther into the future, because I know for sure our ideas right now are totally and unbelievably mistaken. Even technology as close as designer babies may be completely different than what we think it is right now, and so I feel as if I will always be consigned to writing about only current in-use technology for fear of it being that inaccurate.
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Post by airc777 on May 14, 2019 1:43:28 GMT
Well if you are just writing for your self and you aren't trying to publish your work and make money what are you afraid of? Your audience rejecting you? Your audience is you.
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Post by anonymous on May 14, 2019 19:25:48 GMT
Just that the story will be fundamentally flawed because of incorrect science.
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Post by Pttg on May 14, 2019 19:42:40 GMT
Science fiction that is written in order to be about the technology or the science is, inevitably, boring drek... and even when it gets the science right, it gets the culture wrong. How many diamond-hard sci-fi novels depict the soviet moon bases of 1999? The maglev trains and waste treatment facilities of an independent US west coast in 1970? (ok, that one's just the one novel called Ecotopia, but still.)
Do what Jules Verne did. He did not see himself as a science fiction author at all; he wrote stories about people, and he used the science of his time to inform the way those people acted and thought about their worlds.
If you're writing about the future in order to be seen as some kind of prophet, I recommend instead that you do what I planned on doing one time: First, write a manuscript that describes the modern world obliquely and with a few fundamental inaccuracies. Pour a cup of tea on it, dry it out, and leave it in your basement for a year. Then, "discover" your "great-grandfather's unpublished novel," and publish it to vast public acclaim. This way you get to be nearly 100% accurate AND actually alive in time to be lauded for it.
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Post by dragon on May 14, 2019 21:01:45 GMT
If you get modern science right, you don't have to worry as long as you don't make it a focus. Also remember, technology does not exist in a vacuum, and economics and sociology are often more important. It is possible to use fusion for power generation, laws of physics say so. Laws of economy likely will make it unfeasible in the foreseeable future, unless there is, for instance, some kind of government subsidy to make companies pick it up. The real barrier to fusion power could be summed up in three words: "coal is cheaper" (same with nuclear, really. Coal is just too bloody cheap). Make up a future where it isn't, and you can have fusion plants powering the whole world.
To theorize about near-future society, you need a good picture of where science is at today, and where it was a while ago (to get an idea about the rate of progress). A lot more is already possible than most people think, and at the same time a lot less "amazing" ideas make economic sense than we think. Biology in particular is a tricky business where there are many unknowns, but understanding it is a matter of (long) time and money, and then you can basically do whatever you want with the human body. Physics, on the other hand, is unlikely to surprise us with a breakthrough that will have a big impact on daily life of the majority of the population. A good bet is cyberpunk - computers becoming more all-encompassing, the decline of privacy, rampant commercialization, that sort of thing. In short term, extrapolate the current trends and remember how their rate of change changes. Generally, the tech of modern world is determined by businessmen, not scientists (nor governments - we'd have that 1999 moonbase if that was the case). In long term, anything goes, more or less, but I like to imagine worlds after some sort of upheaval demolishes the old order of the world, and how the new order is determined by who exactly survived and with what.
"Science-rewriting events" are seldom unanticipated (see the buildup to Einstein's theory of relativity, and how Lorentz eventually arrived at basically the same thing with his aether theory) and usually not all-encompassing. Clark Ashton Smith was writing about nuclear-propelled ether ships and weaponry based on splitting atoms way back in the 30s. He based it on theories that were floating around at that time, and was well researched enough that aside from a handful of things like "ether-propellers", it mostly holds up. Indeed, he is one of the few writers who made his alien life truly alien and remarkably bizarre.
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Post by anonymous on May 15, 2019 2:21:29 GMT
Pttg Why are you so condescending as to suggest that I am trying to become a prophet or that I am writing a story with no substance? Can't you take the post at face value? dragon Thanks, you've really encouraged me to stop worrying as much. Yes, I consider the economics and sociology around these sorts of things, especially about nuclear propulsion. I am interested in this idea of an aether propeller. Are there any threads on this forum about such a device? I am familiar with Lorentz's ideas about a luminferous medium but I have no clue how one would use it for propulsion.
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Post by dragon on May 16, 2019 18:25:01 GMT
It could have been possible with earlier aether theories (Smith was a writer, not a scientist, and in the 30s SR still wasn't quite as widely accepted as today), no so much with later ones. The later version of the Lorentz aether theory is basically special relativity with names swapped around (indeed, they're mathematically equivalent, and a few things from it seem to have seeped over into modern SR), and would not allow anything of that sort. Aether, as traditionally understood, isn't really necessary, though some philosophers now argue that it would be a better term than vacuum, because it turned out it's not quite as empty as we previously thought.
You could make a case for calling the Alcubierre drive an "aether propeller" if Lorenz's terminology had come into wider use, but it's based on SR not holding up when it's in use, and any aether-based vocabulary for general relativity is pure fiction (doesn't stop you from making an alternate universe and inventing one, though). Not to mention it probably wouldn't spin around like Smith described it, anyway. It was a reasonable thing to imagine back then, and they didn't quite have rock-solid proofs of SR that we do today. Still, replace the thing with a lift fan and NTR combo, and the stories would still work. The exact means of propulsion of the "ether ships" in those stories seldom matter much. Indeed, Smith's later stories switched to using rocketships almost exclusively, so it appears he still caught on pretty quickly.
This is the trick, in fact. Don't focus on the science. Heinlein once wrote a story that had a climax depending on Mercury being tidally locked to the sun. That was later disproved, and he refused to rewrite it, but the story still works - while Mercury isn't exactly tidally locked, its day/night cycle is very slow, so on human timescales the results are close enough, and the story ultimately depended on behavior of a human who had previously been living on Mercury. This is what you want to aim for. If you rely on the exact numerical value of some physical constant, you run the risk of it changing. If you rely on its order of magnitude, and it's not something highly disputed like cosmological constant, you'll likely have it right even if it gets revised.
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