My near-future Science Fiction novel WE had reached the copy-editing stage. It was time for a last check on all the technical detail that I had written into its pages. .
I’d done my best with this. I’d ploughed the pages of Wikipedia, talked with teachers, doctors and a local retired professor of nuclear physics (although I was left suspecting that I hadn’t fully understood that conversation – maybe because neither of us had.) Still, if you are building a space station on the very edge of the solar system, there’s a lot of science you want to be sure of. I was uneasy.
Then, at that careers fair, I rediscovered an old school friend with whom I had misspent much time twenty years before in activities it might damage my credibility to admit. Old friend was now – guess what? – Head of Physics and Astronomy at a well known academic institution. I plucked up my courage and asked, um… did he know anybody who might be willing to look over my typescript ?
Professor M—, CSci CPhys FInstP OBE, turned to his Department. Battalions of research fellows, students and other eminent minds pounced on the manuscript (and not, I think, because of the meagre credits I was offering). I waited their verdict in trepidation, telling myself that it was better to know the worst now than find out after the book was published. Anyway, I was a professional story-teller. I could talk myself out of anything, couldn’t I? I could write black into white if I had to. There’s a lot in common between the author and the con-artist.[1]
The returns came in. I looked them over and found that the Department had corrected my spelling, picked up my typos and politely advised me that a certain hyperbolic sentence about the laws of physics might be improved by deletion. I sighed with relief and gave thanks to Wikipedia.
Too soon. Others were still working. Pursued by terse reminders from The Professor, they completed their notes and turned them in. And…
Ah.
Ah-ahah-hah.
For the storyteller, there are three kinds of Inconvenient Truth.
- There’s the sort where you’ve got it wrong, but all you need to do is side-step. Delete one word, fiddle with its neighbours to keep the sentence beautiful, and you’ve dealt with it. These are far the most common. They are like asteroids that burn up in the atmosphere. Flash, and they’ve gone.
- There’s the sort that have an impact. In this case, I needed it to be too dangerous to walk out on the surface of my planet wearing just a pressure suit. But it seemed that suits could be designed to take anything my planet could conceivably throw at it. So suddenly I had to invent another reason why my characters couldn’t just go walking on the surface. That needed thought. The trick with this kind of amendment, introduced late in the drafting process, is to make your patch feel like it’s part of the flow of everything the reader is experiencing and not just something that the author has stuck in to get himself out of a problem.
- Finally there are the whoppers. Suppose the department had told me that something I thought absolutely fundamental to the novel could not possibly happen. (Not that they did in this case, and anyway a scientist is unlikely to say ‘can’t possibly’.) But if they had, all I could have done would have been to tell myself that Science Fiction was fiction first and science second, thanked the scientist and written that black was white anyway.
The point of research is to sustain belief: yours as well as your reader’s. But if the facts won’t fit then you must fall back on craft. Truth comes second to the Story.
[1] We’re distant cousins, in fact, but neither of us likes to admit it.