MARS - Not for Your Winter Vacation

Sci-Fi Deak Style
by John Deakins

In our SF tour of the Solar System, Mars holds a prominent spot. It’s our most Earth-like sister planet. There’s actually some water present; temperatures are sometimes above water’s freezing point. If we travel to another planet, it’s the first choice. A human colony could potentially survive there.

We aren’t going: not with current technology. The projected trip is a minimum two years, one way. The astronauts would arrive with ten percent of their brain cells dead and developing cancer, from cosmic radiation. We’d need a perfectly recycling ecosystem onboard that would last five years. We haven’t sustained one on Earth for six months yet.

Though writers have created unusual native Martian life, no Martians will be waiting when/if we land. We’ve tested repeatedly. Martian water was once abundant; the temperature is in the right range. Life just didn’t happen. There’s no Martian life now and no trace of any past life-forms. Though it sometimes hits 25ºC (80ºF) on the Martian equator in summertime, there’s no Mars surface that doesn’t fall below freezing nightly.

Humans would be limited to warmed suits, with oxygen, and sealed bases. Nevertheless, Mars can be terraformed. The polar “ice” caps are mostly frozen CO2, but there’s water, too. We need solar-powered Martian satellites that convert sunlight to microwaves. Microwaves beamed continually at the polar caps would release both water and CO2. We can give Mars a greenhouse atmosphere.

Excess CO2 is Mars’ friend; colonists would still require respirators for possibly centuries to come. Hardy lichens that grow on Antarctica would grow there now. We simply seed the polar areas; photosynthesis begins. Unfortunately, the photosynthesis that ups oxygen content steals the heat-holding CO2. We have to get the water content up, too, to produce more oxygen. Perhaps we could generate another greenhouse gas, such as methane, as we lower the CO2 content.

Good news: There’s plenty of water out there (but not on Mars). We’d need automated ships to the Asteroids. (Some have a high water content). With an attached rocket, a water-bearing asteroid could be crashed into the non-settled side of Mars, raising the temperature and releasing atmospheric H2O. There may be mountain-sized icebergs in Jupiter’s ring; Saturn’s rings are an unlimited supply of ice chunks. We could nuke Europa, blowing icebergs into space, to be steered toward Mars.

You may have been hearing a background sound like rupturing a hippo. We pause while the shrieks of the science purists die down. Would we dare to violate the pristine purity of Mars and/or Europa before they’re studied? You bet your bippy we would.

We’re SF writers. Of course we dare! That’s why we can’t quit writing. If humans are going to the planets, we’ll be going for human reasons. Profitable adventure is ‘way ahead of scientific purity. Those afflicted with the Mt. Everest Syndrome (“Because it’s there.”) aren’t going to wipe their feet before they step out on a new world.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and lives in Arkansas. As an author, John has fantasy novels in print from the Barrow series.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

Venus - Not Just a Pretty Face

Sci-Fi Deak Style
by John Deakins

Returning to our tour of the planets: Venus is the next from the Sun. It has near Earthlike gravity, but no moon. The good news is that it’s a unique environment. The bad news is that that environment is impossible for human life.

On a balmy day at the Venusian north pole, the temperature drops to a mere 600ºC. If you set out a block of lead, it would melt like margarine during a sunny Earth afternoon. Venus experiences a runaway greenhouse effect. Solar energy that enters its atmosphere stays there. At the Venusian equator, the temperature reaches 800ºC. The atmosphere is many times denser than Earth’s. Pressures are enormous.

The Venusian air is made of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid. There’s limited water. Even at room temperature, it would eat your lungs or skin for a snack. Worse, it’s never still. Hurricane winds of 500 km/hr blow continuously. The constant roiling and overheating lead to lightning. A few seconds on Venus sees more lightning hits than a day on Earth. No spacecraft From Earth would last more than minutes there.

We’ll assume that you’ve jumped the enormous hurdles of months-long travel times, closed ecosystems in flight, and radiation exposure. You’ve reached Venus: Now what?

It’s a little late to Ignore It. Past writers (Burroughs, Heinlein, Brackett) could set adventures in the steamy Venusian swamps, but you can’t get away with that. In the near future, you’ll have to use Live With It. Venus’ raging atmosphere and impossible heat have to be useful for something unique. You’re the SF writer: Work on it.

Unexplained Science can work, but only in the far future. Before we can exploit Venus, interplanetary travel will have to have become common. Could we terraform Venus? Twenty kilometers above its surface, the temperature drops to 15ºC (60ºF). The atmosphere is thin. We could take an airborne algae from Earth and a bacterium able to metabolize sulfuric acid, and play games with their DNA. Given enough lab time, we could create a hybrid organism that could float high enough to begin diminishing the CO2 and breaking down the acid, with its large potential chemical energy. After a few thousand years, we could reduce the planet’s temperature, transform the atmosphere, and begin seeding the surface with more complex plants. That takes a lot of patience.

Postulate anti-gravity. Build Cloud City, floating above the hostile atmosphere. All you need is a reason to be there.

Move an asteroid from beyond Mars and give Venus a moon: no atmosphere; plenty of shielding; many problems eliminated. Perhaps it could be a way-station to Mercury.

Build a Venusian beanstalk in orbit, with its “tail” intentionally dragging in the atmosphere. (You might use another metallic asteroid for your materials.) Sulfuric acid is a valuable industrial chemical that Venusian orbital factories might use. The excess heat, transferred up the beanstalk as electricity, could be used to power those same factories.

Timing is everything. We won’t be visiting Venus anytime soon.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and lives in Arkansas. As an author, John has fantasy novels in print from the Barrow series.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

Reach for the Planets

Sci-Fi Deak Style
by John Deakins

Before we visit the stars, we need to reach the planets. Each presents unique problems, but all share nasty holdups. Travel time will be measured in months or years. We presently can’t sustain humans in a closed ecosystem that long. Never mind interstellar voyages: You’re going to need suspended animation for humans to reach any planet.

Cosmic rays will leave every (normally shielded) astronaut with brain damage and cancer. Jupiter and its moons are also a hot-spot of radiation, because of Jupiter’s near-brown-dwarf status. Suspended animation will require lead coffins, in addition to other problems.

Mercury, innermost, would allow us to use the Sun’s gravity as an assist inbound. We’d have to fight it outward bound, unless we use the Sun as a gravitational slingshot. Even so, we’re talking 1.5 to 2 years for flight. Solar radiation increases as you move toward Mercury.

Mercury’s solar face is a maelstrom of heat and radiation. There’ll be no landing there. It’s still very slowly revolving; every square meter was blast-furnaced sometime. Smelted metals – gold, platinum, uranium - will be accessible from almost any landing. Unlimited energy exists only a few kilometers from the light-dark demarcation line.

Mercury’s back face remains near 20ºK. The Sun never shines there. Energy would need to come from broadcasting satellites using solar super-power. Except for scientific studies, there’s not much reason to land there.

The only barely habitable area is Mercury’s twilight zone, at the demarcation line, at most a few kilometers wide. We could set up a station, in shadow, not too far from solar power, and mine heavy metals. Outside, we could use the element lead the way we use copper on earth. Lead becomes super-conductive in Mercury’s shade, and there ought to be plenty of lead available.

Problems? Getting there will be the biggest problem, but let’s set that aside. Mercury has oxygen, as metal oxides in rocks, but it has no elemental hydrogen or nitrogen. Those must be imported from Earth. Those essential elements were cooked out and lost into space long ago. Once again, we require a closed ecosystem (which we have yet to create) only the humans must remain awake.

As an inner planet, Mercury will have higher than Earth’s background radiation. All building materials will be radioactive, not enough to kill immediately, but enough to sterilize, cause cancer, or produce brain damage, over long exposure. That means either a terminal deployment, or regular, hideously expensive and difficult crew rotations.

How do you approach Mercury? For the flight, Ignore It works best. Concentrate on the need for humans to be there. Remember: If your story line is powerful enough, the reader won’t ask embarrassing questions about suspended animation, radiation, or missing elements. If the human need is great enough, every problem can be moved over to Live With It. Every Mercuryman will plan to die there or in transit.

If you use Unexplained Science, create a radiation-proof energy field for ships and Mercury base. Good luck. Using real science, Mercury remains almost out of reach.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and lives in Arkansas. As an author, John has fantasy novels in print from the Barrow series.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

Unexplained Science

Sci-Fi Deak Style by John Deakins

There’s another approach to Time Travel that creates space travel instead. Your Unexplained Science involves a device that moves in Time, separately from moving in Space. The Earth, however, is in constant high-velocity motion in Space. Thus, when you activate your machine, you’ll leave Earth behind and end up in the Great Vacuum . . . which is exactly what you want.

Once you get away from Earth’s gravity well, escape velocity drops off by the inverse square law. If you allow the Earth to move out from under you on its own journey by 50,000 km, its pull becomes negligible. You’ve just created cheap interplanetary flight. Instead of kinetic launching, which currently costs $2 million/kg, you’ll expend only the energy to run your time machine.

Stories in Martian or Asteroid conclaves have always depended on Ignore It or Unexplained Science. It’d destroy most economies to send out more than a handful of people. The enormous flight times are also a problem. We can’t sustain a closed ecosystem for the time required. A conservative guess for Mars is two years, one way. You’ve just created a way to cut travel time to months instead.

Good news: The Solar System as a whole, including you, has the same relative velocity in terms of the galaxy and the cosmos. Popping off Earth only enough to ignore its gravity won’t leave you hopelessly between stars, unless you try to go too far. All you wanted was off Earth, and you’re there!

Space is bigger than anyone really appreciates. You can send out repeated flights, and never have to worry about Flight 2 materializing inside Flight 1. By the time Flight 2 launches, the whole Solar System will have moved thousands kilometers in its orbit around the Milky Way center: You’ll be in pristine vacuum.

You’ll have to spend a lot of computer time calculating how “far” to move temporally, so that you take advantage of the sling-shot effects of the Earth’s rotation and revolution. You’ll want whatever help Conservation of Momentum can give. Space travel will still be expensive. Going to Mars? Let the Earth’s motions help throw you in the right direction, but leave its gravity behind.

We’ve solved all the problems: Right? The technology of move-in-Time/move-in-Space has to be kept Top, Top Secret. Sure, you’re going to launch your Mars expedition by popping your craft, say, five minutes backwards in Time and pushing off toward Mars, sans gravity. What happens if you only move, say, a tenth of a second?

Your device could end up inside the Earth’s crust. Its atoms and the crustal atoms would fuse; you’d generate a neat, homemade nuclear explosion. A terrorist could simply set up under New York, send a few pounds of rocks a fraction of a second in Time, and New York would rain down over the Eastern Seaboard. Retaliation could lead to Nuclear Winter and the extinction of Homo sapiens.

Children, be careful with your toys: more problems next time.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom now retired and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

Unexplained Science

by John Deakins

Time Travel always requires Unexplained Science. You have to have a time machine. The “machine” might transfer human consciousness, move you bodily, or accidentally suck you through a time-warp. Even (ugh!) Romantic Fantasy needs a magic mirror or something. Remember the dangers of over-explaining? Unexplained Science is a subset of “Ignore It.” There ain’t no time machines, and the science to produce one is nonexistent.

Time travel will work if your time machine is actually a time-and-space machine. You’ve re-invented the Star Trek transporter, emphasizing movement through Time instead of transportation through space. You can travel to past-Chicago if your machine compensates for the thousands of kilometers by which past-Chicago is separated from present-Chicago and somehow sloughs off all that nasty kinetic energy and momentum difference between the two. That’s asking a lot, but Star Trek repeatedly “beams up” people, inevitably involving Time as well as space. There’s only Gee-Whiz “Science” behind the “transporter.” I’d be almost embarrassed to use it.

You can Live With It. We all already travel in time: forward only. A human in suspended animation, could “skip ahead” to the future. Perhaps you foresee a future that great past SF authors haven’t envisioned. Going backward in Time, however, is out of the question. Almost every writer has been forced to go with Ignore It. How embarrassing! Is there no hope?

You wouldn’t think that it’d take long to exhaust Live With It. What you really want is to stay in a fixed location relative to the Earth, as you travel in Time. Why not pick an unchanging object on the Earth, like a piece of dense metal, and “lock” your time machine to that? Your (fictional) machine would always arrive in the same relative position to its “Time anchor,” even as the planet moves around. It would be best always to travel to the same relative day-hour-minute-second as the time you left. Thus, there’d be only minor differences between your beginning momentum and arrival momentum. The Time anchor could absorb small momentum differences, like catching an incoming carrier jet on a tail-hook. Travel too “far” in Time would create too great a momentum difference, however, and the anchor might melt or explode. Can you say, “One way trip?”

You now have a workable time machine. Think of all the wonderful complications you can generate. What if your “time anchor” hadn’t actually been in as “fixed” as you thought? Somebody moved it, and nobody told you. You could end up on another continent in an alien culture. What if the “solid” anchor you depended on hadn’t always been as solid as you assumed? What if the math was wrong and, after a certain number of years, solid molecules had moved beyond their apparently fixed positions?

Why were you time traveling at all? Is the past a “fixed” continuum, no matter what you change? Is the past flexible so that you change the future by your slightest action? What about the paradoxes? It’s time to have fun again.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

TIME TRAVEL

Sci-Fi Deak Style
by John Deakins

Fictional Time Travel is so universal that every SF writer feels obliged to write a Time Travel story. “Our heroine’s time machine leaves 2013 Chicago and emerges in . . .” 1913 Chicago, future Chicago, Jurassic Chicago, Native American Chicago; etc. What wonderful possibilities! Unfortunately, Time Travel carries the worst scientific flaws of any major SF idea.

We live in an Einsteinian universe. Newton’s laws also work pretty well. Time Travel requires a Ptolemaic, geocentric universe, of which this ain’t one.

If you travel in Time from a particular spatial location, you should emerge in that same location: Right? As the Earth rotates, Chicago is rolling eastward at 1600 km/hr. In the next second, your position will separate from your original by over 400 meters. Five minutes in Time is over 130 kilometers in space. The spinning Earth just won’t hold still!

Unless you repeal Conservation of Momentum, when you arrive with a twelve clock-hours difference than the time of day you left, you’ll exit onto an Earth in which everything on the rotational counter-side will be slamming into you at 3200 km/hr.

Just make sure that you travel exactly multiples of one day. Chicago will have rotated to the same spot . . . except that the Earth is revolving around the Sun at 30 km/sec more. Five minutes is almost 9000 km away. Even a quick jaunt leaves you breathing vacuum.

Don’t forget the Sun’s orbit around the Milky Way’s core (Add hundreds of km/hr more.) and the motion of the galaxy relative to the space-time continuum. Unless your time machine is also a sealed space craft, you won’t survive to appreciate just how much airless space the universe contains.

What about reentry? When you reach a new space-time locus, will you simply push the air aside as you expand from an infinitesimally small point? That would produce a whopper of a thunderclap. Arriving secretly would be impossible. If your machine were too flimsy, the rebounding shock wave would crush it.

Will you and the local molecules simply become one? Writers agree that arriving inside a solid, regardless of method, would be a poor survival idea. With untold trillions of molecules present, some of yours would arrive inside other molecules. You might blow up like a balloon, or simply blow up. If your atomic nuclei appeared in the same space as local atomic nuclei, and the strong nuclear force would fuse them, with fatal radiation and energy release. Nuclei that were close, but not close enough, would be repelled at particle-collider speeds. You’d create thousands of fast particles that would shred your cells like a radioactive shotgun blast.

We don’t want to give up Time Travel, but what can be done? You can always Ignore It. Your readers are also geocentric. They won’t notice that you can’t travel from now-Chicago to then-Chicago without cheating on the universe’s rules. Have fun.

That’s a solution? We’re Science fiction purists. There has to be a better way. More next time.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

Live With It

Sci-Fi Deak Style
by John Deakins

In the case of faster-than-light travel, we’re stuck with Ignore It or Unexplained Science. It’s possible to Live With It. If you can’t go faster than light, go slower than light. We can add Bussard Ram Jets or light sails, gradually accelerating to a useful fraction of light-speed. We won’t even try for trans-light speed, heading outward at a relative crawl. That’ll require decades or centuries of travel. That could work, but those solutions arrive with their own new problems.

We’ll need a “generation” ship even for the close stars. Youthful astronauts launch for Proxima Centauri; their grandchildren arrive to send back data. That involves maintaining a closed ecosystem for decades and shielding passengers and plants from a universe awash with cosmic rays. Otherwise, Generation 1 dies from lack of oxygen or fails to reproduce after being sterilized. Everybody dies of cancer, or the crew can’t control the ship because of accumulated brain damage. Social problems aboard would be huge.

A well-shielded craft would solve some problems, but its mass would reduce it to even slower crawl-speed, no matter what was pushing it. The crew would go from “generation” to generations. Could we maintain a viable social system and a closed ecosystem that long? I doubt it.

A round trip? You’re kidding, right? Slower-than-light flights are all one-way. Earth wouldn’t be your Earth anymore if you ever returned. The big problems rise from keeping a crew awake for an incredibly long time. So, put ‘em to sleep. We don’t have “cold sleep” or suspended animation for humans, but those are the kind of reasonable future developments that Science Fiction thrives on. Don’t wake up the crew, unless you can put them back to sleep. Machines don’t have to worry about century-long flights. Let a super-computer oversee all the sleepers. We could call him “Hal.”

Maybe you could wake the crew periodically. That leads to social complications. What if something goes wrong with the rotation? What if an active crew member goes bonkers?

You’ll need a ship that cosmic rays can’t reach the crew or the frozen passengers. A shaped asteroid would be the logical vessel. You’d have to postulate controlled fusion for energy, a perfectly recycling closed ecosystem, frozen sleep, and solutions to a myriad of social problems, but those are difficult. Trans-light speeds are impossible.

With so many scientific mountains to climb, why would we go there in the first place? Maybe we have to. Has the Earth become uninhabitable? Is the Sun about to explode? Have aliens driven us from our home? The writer can shine with new ideas there. Maybe we just want to go to the stars. Could interstellar travel become a religious quest? Could a star trip become the ultimate “high” for the enormously rich? Perhaps, for certain pre-disposed humans, the stars will become the ultimate Mt. Everest. Each new reason is the parent of another story.

Past writers have found a dozen exits bypassing the “No FTL” roadblock. Try out a few yourself.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

IGNORE IT

Sci-Fi Deak Style
by John Deakins

Nothing goes faster than light; no matter in our universe can reach light-speed. We can’t get around that fact. First, there’s presently no easy way to accelerate to anywhere close to light speed. To leave Earth requires roughly 11,000 m/s. Our fastest spacecraft might have reached 20,000 m/s. The speed of light is 300,000,000 m/s. We’re not even close (.7%). At conventional rocket velocities, the nearest star is over sixty thousand years away. No one is going to survive even the shortest interstellar trip using current technology.

We are Science Fiction! We have to go to the stars! For that, we need trans-light speeds. The first approach we must be Ignore It. An FTL ship takes off from Earth, and after plot-development (days; weeks) reaches Proxima Centauri. Or Hans Solo zooms the Millennium Falcon toward Cloud City. No one asks how his FTL drive works.

Many readers are completely unfamiliar with interstellar distances. They have a feeling that if you go fast enough, you’ll get there in a reasonable time. The trouble is that you can’t go fast enough. The closest star is over four years away at light speed. We don’t produce anything even close to light speed. We’d have trouble keeping interest in a voyage lasting even four years, and no one is projecting any planets orbiting Proxima Centauri. Every reasonable solar system is much farther. A thousand-year star voyage is almost beyond fiction. It rapidly drops off into silly science contrivance. Ignore It burns out its batteries trying to fix too many scientific contradictions. Nevertheless, Ignore It may be the only solution. Hopefully, our plotting will be so good that readership won’t notice when we travel at speeds that simply aren’t possible, never mind the rest of the impossibilities involved.

The second approach is Unexplained Science. No one has to explain how a “warp drive” works on Star Trek; they only have to name it. Some works hint at “wormholes” or “hyper space,” but the smart author will slide around the hard science. If you find a golden egg in your basket, don’t be dumb enough to ask how it arrived. If you postulate a ship with FTL drive, don’t be dumb enough to tinker with explanations. Unfortunately, that makes Unexplained Science just a subset of Ignore It.

How do we make this all work? Ignore It works well in Space Opera. (Have you ever wondered why ships that have anti-gravity and FTL drives still need fuel?) Let’s leave the “how” of FTL and impossible speeds entirely alone and concentrate on the action and the human interplay. Throw in a little Unexplained Science if you think the audience is getting restless.

Limit your FTL Unexplained Science to names only, hopefully a single pseudo-science title: maybe Space-time Folding or Worm-hole generator. Otherwise, you’ll end up looking like the Hollywood pimps are running you, too. (That would make you a . . . Never mind.)

There is another way out, but not this week.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

Are You a Science Fiction Writer?

by John Deakins

Never mind what you write: what do you read? Scientists and technologists who never write SF themselves, read it continually. They may not always recognize bad writing, but they’ll immediately spot a scientific or logical blunder. Science fiction has a better educated readership than that of bodice ripper romances. Listen as your SF-reading friends rip into some recently released SF film. Want more readers? Your current readers can make your book by word of mouth, but those readers can kill your book the same way. The Ignore It approach to scientific road-blocks may not be enough.

Live With It

Science is cold, hard, and unyielding, but it won’t let you down on consistency. If you’re stymied by missing FTL drives, write a story with slower-than-light interstellar transport. If it’s too dangerous to land on an alien planet, create a way to make contact without landing. If you can’t use your time machine for time travel, use it for space travel. Real science happens all the time. Most of what happens within our solar system follows fairly simple Newtonian physics, never mind Einstein. That’s a huge canvas on which to paint your word pictures.

You have before you enormous possibilities within Science. Mars doesn’t have multiply armed green Martians, but what it does have is fascinating, even if it is hard, cold, and unyielding.

Unexplained Science.

You don’t have to explain how your SF technology works; you only have to name it. In fact, the more you explain it, the sillier your explanations will sound to anyone who actually knows science. Some stories need controlled time travel, faster-than-light speed, and the ability to smooze with aliens, but the smart author will tiptoe around hard-science details of exactly how those things are accomplished.

The biggest danger of unexplained science lies inside the writer. We know our science. “Unexplained” makes us itch. It’ll be hard not to yield to the pressure to throw in “subspace” devices or “tachyon pulses.” Hollywood pimps are eager for more “drama” in their SF. They know no science, but they’re full of hackneyed “science fiction” ideas. (Well . . . they’re full of something.) Their “science” explanations stink up the genre; flawed logic flows from mainstream media as from a ruptured sewer line. How easily unexplained science crosses over into partially explained fantasy! On the west coast, that’s a mighty thin line. Nevertheless, it’s a line that we shouldn’t cross.

It’s time now to take on the behemoths of science fiction. We’ll beat them into submission, and then harness them to pull our stories. The blogs that follow are full of story “hooks.” If one snags you, go with it If you get that literary gestalt, when a story leaps full-blown into your mind, quit reading this and write that story. When you do, you’ve made this work a success.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

IMPOSSIBILITIES

by John Deakins

We’re going to take on some Science Fiction favorites: Time travel, Faster-Than-Light, alien planet landings. It’s not that those haven’t happened yet; they can’t happen. Think how bleak Science Fiction would be if those mechanisms were missing. We’ll beat them mercilessly, proving that they absolutely cannot work scientifically. Then, we’re going to rescue each concept. They’re too important to Science Fiction to let ugly Science kill them. We’ll nurture them before they depart down bright new pathways.

Erk! Touchy-feely exposition isn’t the answer here. Gritty, bottom-line repair work is There are three ways to get around a real-science roadblock. Here’s the first one - Ignore It.

Pretend the gorilla isn’t in the room. Throw an afghan over him, and call him an armchair. Stick to your plot’s logical development. Sweep your readers along so beautifully that they’ll suspend disbelief in that flawed area. Hollywood SF runs on the “Queen of Hearts Principle.” Viewers are expected to believe six impossible things before breakfast. Since Star Wars, some studios believe that with enough special effects no one will notice how scientifically ridiculous and logically impossible their plots are. The Core and 2012 are first-line examples. Anyone who knew science or logic ran from the theater screaming. Their science was ludicrous, their logic was M.I.A., but they had great special effects. Each also probably made enough money to pay for itself, which is all that Hollywood wanted anyway. Science fiction is expected to have higher standards.

Each of us is often expecting our readership to fork over more than a $10 “ticket.” Readers have no “Now Showing“ deadlines. They don’t have to either open your creation when the lights go down or close it when the credits roll. They have plenty of time to catch you with your scientific knickers around your knees. Each additional scientific impossibility means that suspension of disbelief has to jump a higher hurdle. Once a movie hits disk, the same rule applies. That audience has all the time they need to autopsy that film.

Can you get away with ignoring science anyway? Yes: You just have to be a terrific creative liar. Remember those first three seasons of Star Trek? Seasons two and three were written by Hollywood hacks. They almost got away with swiss-cheese science (more holes than curds) and lousy logic, because the series was ground-breaking in so many other ways. Trekkies are still a force, but some of those later episodes were pure twaddle.

Perhaps you’ll get lucky. Perhaps many of your audience will be unaware of the particular science that you’re violating. You and they can skip along together, blissfully pretending. Some will always be carried along by the spectacle, whether written or cinematic. I wouldn’t count on that, though. Remember how Star Trek’s five-year mission fizzled out after three years? Even for SF fans, bad writing and spotty logic begin to smell funny after a while.

There has to be a better way, and we need to find it.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

SCI-FI DEAK STYLE

Science That Doesn’t Work In Science Fiction. . . But Has To

by John Deakins

The first word in “Science Fiction” is “Science.” “SF” includes Speculative Fantasy, but Science Fiction is supposed to remain pristine. The Science has to work. Readers expect the paranormal in fantasy, but Science Fiction must stick to the rules of the universe. Certainly, every hard SF story springs from some scientific aspects that have fictionally altered. When we adventure in the Asteroid Belt, both writer and reader are aware no humans have yet reached the Asteroid Belt. That’s why they call it fiction. We’re all in on the inside joke: We all know we’re lying. The object is to make the lies entertaining.

Once we’re committed to the Asteroid Belt, however, writing rules change. The remaining science must be correct; the logic must be consistent. Our flights among the orbiting rocks must obey the Newton’s laws. Our spacecraft can’t be towed by a dragon flapping its wings. A wizard can’t wave his wand and transport us instantly to the next rock. An Elf isn’t going to lead us down tunnels inside magically orbiting mountains. We’re obliged to stick to scientific facts. Our fiction is like an exotic SF game, but we’re only allowed playing pieces that actually function in this universe. We must follow if>>>then logic: If certain current scientific knowledge has been altered, then a story follows thus…

Some of the greatest fun of SF writing is the amount of mayhem we can create from behind our keyboard. We can destroy the world with an asteroid impact, nuclear war, or plague. We can suffocate our astronauts in unforgiving vacuum. We can kill space colonists with unnamed pestilence or human-devouring monsters. We can deliver supernovas, rampaging aliens, and fatal time paradoxes. We can alter history or bring humans to extinction. It’d be a shame to see our reign of terror end just because we’re shackled by science’s rock-hard rules.

The trouble is that scientific laws are hard, cold and unyielding. There is nothing sadder than a beautiful theory killed by an ugly fact. For the Science Fiction writer, that sadness occurs when a beautiful story idea is gored by an ugly scientific principle. For example, Burroughs’ Mars and Venus just aren’t there. We’d like to ride a thoat across the lichen-covered plains or explore the steaming Venusian swamps, but we simply can’t do that in Science Fiction. Alas, the Mars of red princesses is fantasy only.

Science is supposed to be the mainstay of Science Fiction. What happens when Science gets in the way of Science Fiction? Sometimes the story-telling urge is so powerful that it makes us willing to slide around our own dogma. To get that story written, we are (shudder!) willing to commit adultery on science. The result is often an offspring that really needed an abortion.

What are we going to do, then? (Funny you should ask that, since that’s what this blog’s about.) Over the next weeks, we will push Science Fiction into several deep science pits and try to rescue it. Stick around.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.