Don’t you hate it when you’re totally absorbed in a TV show, movie or book, and a character says something so annoyingly stupid that you’re ripped right out of the story and back into reality, fuming at the writer?
This is particularly a hazard when it comes to sci fi.
You’ve got intergalactic space travel, robots, time travel, and aliens who travel through time and space to fight aliens, cyborgs, and time-travelling alien cyborgs (with nothing more than their trusty sonic screwdrivers and plucky human companions). There’s advanced medical technology, teleportation, and people with all sorts of biological enhancements. Some of this stuff is unlikely to ever happen, some of it could happen, some of it is quite likely given current science and technology, and some of it is pretty much already here.
At its best, the ideas, technologies and science in science fiction will not only be plausible given the science of the day, they’ll actually be pretty good predictions about the future of science. Take Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. At its core, Brave New World, like most other stories about a dystopian future, is a warning from the author about how society’s going to go down the plug-hole if we keep certain things up. But in among his characters’ pages-long monologues to lecture us about the perils to humanity of everything you’re doing right now, Huxley constructed a world with pretty accurate predictions of where technology was heading. While some aspects of his world haven’t eventuated (like movie theatres with sensation as well as sight and sound so that you can feel the fur of a bearskin rug and the heat of a fire), Huxley was impressively prescient when he wrote about helicopters, in vitro fertilisation, readily available mood-stabilising drugs, and birth control in pill form.
The purists will argue that if the science in sci fi (or ‘speculative fiction’ as they sometimes loftily like to call it) isn’t predictive or plausible, then it’s not really sci fi—it’s just fantasy where the wizards with magic wands have been replaced with white-coated scientists wielding teleporters.
Plausible and predictive are fine goals for science in fiction, but probably rather difficult to achieve. I would personally be happy if, every time there was some science in fiction that is explained by a character in a way that’s so inaccurate and outlandish to be laughable, that line was removed and replaced with the perfectly correct “a wizard did it” (as Lucy Lawless put it in The Simpsons).
Here’s what I mean: in Battlestar Galactica, the characters travel vast distances across the universe in alarmingly short spans of time. How do they do it? The jump drive, of course. What’s a jump drive? It doesn’t matter. All the audience needs to know is that it moves the ship and its crew from A to B in space really really quickly.
In Doctor Who, characters are always standing in for the audience by asking the Doctor annoying questions about things. Why is there so much room inside the police box-shaped TARDIS? Easy: because it’s bigger on the inside. Explain again how we’re travelling back and forth through time and not mucking things up? Well, that’s because time is not linear but more of a big ball of timey-wimey stuff. Done.
And let’s not forget the flux capacitor in Back to the Future. As Doc put it: “it’s what makes time travel possible”. Well, there’s that sorted then.
A great benefit of this approach is that it gives the writers a huge amount of freedom with their sci-fi objects. Example: “Oh no, we need to jump away from those Cylons, but the jump drive’s been flooded with radiation and it’s affecting the jump coordinates!” The audience can readily accept this. Because no one’s tried to explain what a jump drive is to us, we’re not going to have inconvenient thoughts like: “Wait a minute! Radiation wouldn’t affect the jump drive because [blah blah blah]!”
I’d be happy with less explanation rather than more when it comes to science in fiction if it avoids painful inaccuracy. It’s kind of unfair to pick on the 1995 movie Hackers because it’s one of those so-bad-it’s-good kind of films, but you’d think that in a movie that’s supposed to be about 1337 h4X0rs, they’d at least try to get their computer terminology right. But in Hackers one of the characters amazingly has an Apple Mac with a Pentium chip, and leet is pronounced “elite”.
If you’ve taken a couple of psychology or biology papers, watching Joss Whedon’s new show Dollhouse probably makes you want to stab out your own eardrums every now and then. Don’t get me wrong, I love Buffy, Fray, and Firefly, and I’m sticking with Dollhouse in the hope that it’ll get better any episode now, but every now and then I find myself screaming at the screen: “Get a better on-set science advisor!” In Dollhouse, people can have their memories and personalities ‘wiped’ so they can be imprinted with new personalities (and memories and “muscle memory”) so that they can undertake different assignments. Yeah I know, it already sounds pretty wacky. But, unwisely, instead of just saying “a wizard did it”, or “thank God we invented the flux capacitor”, the characters are forever trying to explain just how their wondrous technology works with perfectly acceptable pseudo-science peppered with totally inaccurate real science. It honestly makes me want to find the nearest fork to jam into my ears.
So there you have it. If you’re writing a novel or screenplay and you’ve got a bit of science in your work that you think doesn’t sound quite right, just remember that a wizard did it, and you will never, ever go wrong.