Okay, look. I’ve been reading science fiction for almost fifty years now. In that time I’ve had more conversations about scientific accuracy than any halfway sane librarian should ever have. Just last month I got into a shouting match with a physics professor (who happens to be a regular customer at the library and visits every Tuesday) about whether Andy Weir had properly calculated atmospheric pressure in The Martian. He was pedantic about details that…
Really. Did not matter.
So maybe here’s what I’ve learned from reading four thousand science fiction books: scientific accuracy and science fiction don’t have the relationship you think they do.
It’s not quantitative. More science doesn’t make something more science-fictiony. It’s qualitative. Think about cooking. Sometimes you need to follow a recipe exactly. Other times you eyeball it. Sometimes you look in the fridge and just… throw things together and hope for the best. Does the final dish taste good? Sure, it helps to follow a recipe. But you don’t need a recipe to cook great food.
When I first read The Martian way back in 2011 (remember when that book wasn’t the juggernaut that it is now?) I had just lost my father (he would’ve dug Weir’s engineer approach to problem-solving). I was going through his library, deciding what books I wanted to keep and what to donate. Someone had recommended this self-published tale of a dude who gets stranded on Mars. Honestly, I almost put it down after reading the first chapter. Survivalist story? Come on, we’ve seen that trope dozens of times before.
But dang if Weir didn’t catch me with his attention to detail. Not just the potato growing garden scenes—those were great. But the way he calculated fuel burns and orbital insertion windows. The logistics of trying to not die on Mars. My eyeballs were drifting to the internet at 2am so I could look up NASA white papers to verify his calculations.
The science in that book made Mark Watney’s snarky humor earn gravity. When he tells someone he’s the greatest botanist on Mars, we believe that enough to care that he grew those goddamn potatoes.
That’s science fiction at its best. Using scientific accuracy to deepen your characters. Let physics create drama. Watney can’t exactly teleport his way out of a survival situation. Hell, he barely manages to not suffocate and die of thirst. Life on Mars is a constant battle against the fundamental laws of chemistry and orbital mechanics. The science creates the stakes.
…but then you get movies like Interstellar and my brain just wants to explode. I saw Interstellar on opening night. Yep, that nerd right there. I went into that movie with nearly as much excitement as curiosity. Nolan had spent years building up to it and everyone—and I mean everyone I knew—was raving about how “science-y” it was. So sure, I kept my expectations in cheque. But lemme tell you…I walked out of that movie angry.
By everything.
Except, frustrated might be the better word. Nolan pulled so many things right. Kip Thorne consultness™ radiates from every frame of those black hole scenes. The physics of time dilation. Effects of gravity on time. Even the depiction of the accretion disk was scientific poetry.
And then…that book shelf.
Love is the thing that transcends dimensions? Really? We just spent the last two hours in a world that was pretty meticulously physics-accurate and now you want me to believe that Dad Jokes are somehow immune to spacetime?
I got angry. Wanted to throw the movie aside, join this onslaught of slam-dunking reviewers who decided that because Interstellar dared to include some fantastical element that the entire thing was hack shit.
But then something happened. I felt it in my soul. Despite everything, that movie worked. Not in a scientific sense. Emotionally, it worked.
Listen—I’ve probably watched Interstellar six or seven times at this point. And every time I get to that stupid corn field I cry like a baby. Nolan built up so much credibility with the first half of that film we didn’t question the decidedly science fiction nature of the bookshelf scene. Because it mattered to the story. The science bought him some metaphysical license to speculate about human connection.
James S.A. Corey does something similar…but less overtly—in their Expanse novels. Corey reasonably nails the physics (no fake gravity unless you’re accelerating, space combat makes sense, life lived without gravity actually affects your shit in realistic ways) Everything about the Belters speaks to how life developed in low-orbit economies. It’s not just racist Americans and Russians speaking with fake British accents. Language has developed differently there. Politics has. Their whole biology is affected. And it works. Believably so. I buy that life in the Belt could actually evolve that way.
…and then the protomolecule shows up. Sure, scientists discover it, but what does it do? Defy physics with exponentially growing aliens!? Cool story, bro. But Corey had already sold me on the scientific credibility of the universe they built. By the time the aliens showed up I was willing to roll with the punches because they had earned my trust.
Okay, so what I’m noticing from all the science fiction I read is this: the best sci-fi I’ve read uses realistic science to buy themselves metaphorical license.
The physics behind ansible communication in The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin is technobabbled to hell, but the fictional physics of her anarchist society work incredibly well. Asimov created the three laws of robotics, but if you actually sit down and apply serious logic to them they fall apart. But those constraints create wonderful stories about consciousness and free will.
See what I’m getting at? The worst science fiction completely misses this. So much modern sci-fi (I won’t mention any names but you know who’s on the bestseller lists) is so bogged down in useless technical details that they fail to think about science at all. Care deeply about how your faster than light drive works but never stop to consider what happens to society when you can communicate instantaneously across a galaxy. Technobabble isn’t science.
Science is thinking. It’s understanding how systems work. Considering the consequences. Asks what if rigorously.
A lot of science fiction that qualifies as hard sci-fi doesn’t really mention science all that much. But it applies that scientific thinking to their stories. Octavia Butler barely needs to mention that the science in her Parable books is solid. What makes them so damn good is how she considers the psychology and society when life as we know it is upended by climate change.
The same can be said for Arrival. The linguistics side of that movie was handwaved harder than myUncleWarren’s Bible. Seriously. Learning an alien language wouldn’t rearrange your concept of time like that. But linguistic first contact was never really the point of the movie. How nations react to discovering we’re not alone? How leaders use/distort that communication? Completely believable.
Why do I get so upset when people conflate these things? I’ll recommend Station Eleven or The Road and someone will inevitably sniff that the post-apocalyptic fallout isn’t scientifically sound. Umm…that’s not the point of either of those books. Here’s the thing about science fiction—the rules change when you start paying attention to scientific thinking instead of purely scientific accuracy.
Science fiction at its worst will just make stuff up and never bother to consider consequences. Scientific thinking wonders how that bazooka gun you installed on your� Von_Destroyer_5000 would actually affect your spaceship’s trajectory when it fires. Worldbuilding weirdness that doesn’t adhere to fundamental laws of science drives me up a wall. Lazy science fiction.
That said…I’ve cheered plenty of low science-y movies/books based purely on some verbal abandonment of the scientific method by the characters. “Balance” is hard to find in media. I’ll take flawed stories that try to do some real thinking over stories that refuse to consider deeper questions any day.
Anyway. I could honestly rant about this all day but the tl;dr of my forty-plus years reading sci-fi is this: accuracy in raw scientific knowledge is valuable, but it isn’t the only form of scientific thinking
you can teach. Stories that understand this, whether they firmly adhere to what we know about science today or not are the stories I’ll always love. At it’s best science fiction doesn’t just speculate about future technology. It applies the scientific method to the questions that really matter to us as humans. Everything else is detail.
Kathleen’s a lifelong reader who believes science fiction is literature, full stop. From her book-filled home in Seattle, she writes about thoughtful, character-driven sci-fi that challenges ideas and lingers long after the last page. She’s a champion for under-read authors and timeless storytelling.