The Science in Science Fiction - Guest Post From Author Douglas Dandridge

The Science in Science Fiction

I grew up reading science fiction back in the 1960s and 70s.  There were many wonderful collections of short stories on bookshelves all over.  Stories by Asimov, Leinster, van Vogt, Heinlein, and too many others to mention, much less remember.  Many of these stories revolved around one obscure principle of science or another.  I remember one, the name of which escapes me, in which the hero of the story had fallen into an enormous alien construct that was shaped like a bowl, made of an almost frictionless material.  The hero appeared doomed to slide back and forth for a long period of time, losing just a little bit of momentum on each swing, until he was trapped at the center, doomed to die when his air ran out.  With little time to waste the hero determined that he could use his equipment and a principle of the conservation of momentum to escape.  Great stuff, an action packed story that actually taught something.  I guess that the writers of that era actually looked over the scientific principle they were going to use in the stories, something that seems to be missing today.

Too many modern science fiction writers seem to pull their science out of the movies and TV shows, where screenplays are written with an eye toward the wow factor, and not for grounding in scientific principles.  And sure, I believe that our understanding of some of the principles will change in the future, and we will discover new principles and ways around some of the old.  But many of the laws of physics will remain the same.  I read one novel by a well-known author, part of a series, in which a gas giant was turned into a star by teleporting a neutron star into its core.  The premise was the gravitational pull of the neutron star would squeeze the hydrogen of the gas giant and jump start fusion.  I’m not sure this would work, and I think the best guess would be that the gas giant would be squeezed into a new layer of neutronium on the star’s surface.  But the biggest flaw in the premise was that the planets continued to orbit around their home star.  Instead, the home star and all the planets would have started orbiting the gas giant/neutron star combo which would have now been the most massive object in the system.  And this was a well-known author who should have known better.  I almost shudder to think of all the mistakes being made by indie authors whose only connection to science is through movies and TV.  I won’t go into all the mistakes I see in those media, but three of my major peeves are:

Objects in space don’t coast to a stop when they turn their engines off.  Really good series, shows that I like, for example Babylon Five, make this mistake all the time.  You don’t need a degree in orbital mechanics to avoid this error, but so many make it.

Spaceships don’t bank in space.  There is no air resistance, in other words no air, for surfaces such as wings to bite into.  Ships can use thrust to change vectors over time, but not to flip over and change course ninety to one eighty degrees in an instant.

Objects hit by beams don’t simply fade away.  Due to the conservation of mass and energy the mass has to go somewhere.  If the object is vaporized, there has to be the same mass of vapor somewhere.  If it is converted to energy the firer needs to be on another continent, because things are about to get really bad really fast (E+MC2).

Some modern writers do it well.  Charles Stross, John Ringo, David Weber among others.  Not perfect, but well.  Of course the old physicist writers did it best, Poul Anderson, Charles Sheffield, Arthur C Clarke, Robert Forward to name a few.  I am not a physicist by any means, though I did take some physics courses.  Biology and Psychology are my fields.  And, several years back, when I took prenursing Anatomy and Physiology courses I was amazed at how much more we knew about biological systems than when I took Biology courses twenty years before.  And I came up with all kinds of ideas on how to use these discoveries in stories.  There are all kinds of information out there, from NASA news releases to tweets of new discoveries, to give writers the ideas and backgrounds they need to come up with great ideas.

Unfortunately, too many ignore anything but popular media.  I try to do it right in my own work.  In fact, I am advertising my upcoming Exodus series as science fiction with real physics.  Of course there are some fantastic made up elements, like the element of hyperlight travel, but it is a challenge to try to keep things as real as possible in normal space.  You’ll just have to read the series to see what I mean.

Doug Dandridge was born in Venice Florida in 1957, the son of a Florida native and a Mother of French Canadian descent. An avid reader from an early age, Doug has read most of the classic novels and shorts of Science Fiction and Fantasy, as well as multiple hundreds of historical works. Doug has military experience including Marine Corps JROTC, Active Duty Army, and the Florida National Guard. He attended Florida State University, studying Biology, Geology, Physics, and Chemistry, and receiving a BS in Psychology. Doug then studied Clinical Psychology at the University of Alabama, with specific interests in Neuropsychology and Child Psychology, completing a Masters and all course work required for a PhD. He has worked in Psychiatric Hospitals, Mental Health Centers, a Prison, a Juvenile Residential Facility, and for the past five years for the Florida Department of Children and Families. Doug has been writing on and off for fifteen years. He concentrates on intelligent science fiction and fantasy in which there is always hope, no matter how hard the situation. No area of the fantastic is outside his scope, as he has completed works in near and far future Science Fiction, Urban and High Fantasy, Horror, and Alternate History.