Realism in sci-fi

You know, there’s nothing unique about what happens in space opera.

As I’ve said elsewhere, space opera just uses all the stock elements of standard drama: love, loss, war, adventure, politics, betrayal, loyalty, companionship, social dissent and turmoil, family relationships and quarrels, the interactions of lovers and friends and enemies.

The difference is that these dramas take place in the vast wastes of interstellar space, on a planet other than Earth. That puts peculiar constraints on what you can do with them—you can’t ignore physics and biochemistry entirely, even if all you’re doing is working out how to circumvent them—but also gives you immeasurable freedom to let yourself roam all over the cosmos.

How realistic should sci-fi be, then?

Answer: it’s entirely up to you.

Take just one stock sci-fi trope: faster than light travel. Thanks to Einstein, realism nixes it from the outset. If you don’t jettison that bit of (apparently immutable) physics for something with more pizzazz, your MCs are never going to get out of Earth’s backyard. It will take them over year to get as far as Mars, which doesn’t allow for a great sweeping epic space drama. Something more contained, yes. But it won’t sprawl.

So, in my book, if you want big and sprawling, you look at how you can circumvent reality and do something plausible instead.

You want your spaceships to travel faster than light. So how can you do that in a way that comes over as credible and persuasive? You can use the warp engines idea that essentially just means you’re going very, very, very fast. Or your ships can drop out of this dimension into hyperspace, or travel from A to B through wormholes, or through the ‘singularities’ much beloved by Star Trek (don’t ask me what they mean by a ‘singularity’. I never could work it out, other than it sounded good and there was obviously only one of them.). Or the ship can teleport from A to B instead, with the advantage that unlike all the other methods, there’s no travel time involved—you pop out of A and arrive in B before you have time to blink. At least that solves the problem of how to occupy yourself on the journey.

I went for hyperspace, because I didn’t want to make things too easy by allowing my spaceships to dematerialise at will. The Gyrfalcon, then, has sub-light engines for tootling around star systems at speeds that don’t give you whiplash, and an f-t-l system for nipping into and out of hyperspace. That was my break with reality. To make it plausible, I started adding details. What were the advantages and the drawbacks? Well, it would be handy to allow communications to be beamed through hyperspace through a network of beacons, and for the ship’s sensors to work, so I allowed both of those. But I didn’t want ships to be able to flick out of danger too easily, because where would the drama be then when they come up against enemy battleships? In Shield universe, they can’t drop into hyperspace either in an atmosphere or when there is lots of energy in flux, as it would be in a space battle when both directed energy beam weapons and laser-cannon are flashing about everywhere. In both cases, any ship that tried to engage their f-t-l engines would turn into a large firework with lots of pretty kabooms and explosions.

None of that is realistic, but I hope that when someone’s reading the books, they at least feel that if I’m breaking Einstein’s rules, the details make that break feel more plausible, that there is an internal logic to it, however faulty.

In the end, what matters is the storytelling. A story doesn’t need to make realistic sense in this world—only in its own. What matters isn’t reality so much, as being authentic and consistent within the confines of the world the author builds. The one important question you, as author, have to answer is simple: what will make this story *work*?

All I can tell you is that it’s a lot of fun finding the answer!

June 28 – Gay Book Reviews, June 30 – Bayou Book Junkie, July 2 – MM Good Book Reviews, July 9 – Love Bytes, July 11 – Queer SciFi, July 13 – Two Chicks Obsessed, July 16 – The Novel Approach, July 18 – Making It Happen

Gyrfalcon (Book #1) Amazon US | Amazon UK
Heart Scarab (Book #2) Amazon US | Amazon UK
Makepeace (Book #3) Amazon US | Amazon UK
The Chains of Their Sins (Book #4) Amazon US | Amazon UK


Blurb


In less than a week, Bennet will finally return to the Shield Regiment, leaving behind the Gyrfalcon, his father, his friends… and Flynn. Promotion to Shield Major and being given command of a battle group despite the political fallout from Makepeace the year before is everything he thought he wanted. Everything he’s worked towards for the last three years. Except for leaving Flynn. He really doesn’t want to leave Flynn.


There’s time for one last flight together. A routine mission. Nothing too taxing, just savouring every moment with the best wingman, the best friend, he’s ever had. That’s the plan.


Bennet should know better than to trust to routine because what waits for them out there will change their lives forever.

Anna Butler was a communications specialist for many years, working in various UK government departments on everything from marketing employment schemes to organizing conferences for 10,000 civil servants to running an internal TV service. These days, though, she is writing full time. She recently moved out of the ethnic and cultural melting pot of East London to the rather slower environs of a quiet village tucked deep in the Nottinghamshire countryside, where she lives with her husband and the Deputy Editor, aka Molly the cockerpoo.


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