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.

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.

A Moment with Leah Rhyne

What's your favourite thing about speculative fiction and why?

I tell my child all the time that I’m terrible at picking favorite anythings. Seriously, I can’t even pick a favorite color – it changes daily. When I’m feeling bright and happy, I love yellow. If I’m a little down, perhaps brown, or grey. On neutral days I go for blues or greens.

I can’t pick a favorite thing about speculative fiction because I love it all, because in speculative fiction, anything can happen. Anything.

Want to go back in time? See the world as it was a thousand years ago? Then go ahead – build a time machine. If you’re writing speculative fiction, you can. You can even choose to ignore the complexities of paradoxes, of changing the past and thus the future, because in your own world, anything goes.

Want to create a new race of alien creatures that inhabit planets in a distant galaxy? Go for it! The weirder the better! Make them look like insects. Make them look like jiggling puddles of Jello. You can even make them look like giant, fuzzy bunnies if you want. It’s your world.

One of my favorite science fiction books of the moment is John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, in which humans get genetically engineered to have green skin and super-strength. He turned people into superhero soldiers, and with them he tried to rule the universe. And why not? It was his universe.

Want to bring to light all the terrifying skeletons that inhabit your deepest, darkest dream closets? Do it. Scare us. In speculative fiction, there’s room for all the monsters.

Picture Stephen King, creating a monster that takes the form of a clown with razor-sharp teeth and claws like knives. Picture him scaring a little girl so much with the resulting novel, she had no choice but to grow up and become a writer herself, to give shapes to her own inner demons.

Now try to imagine a world without speculative fiction. A world that never included the stories of Jules Verne or H.G. Wells or Edgar Allen Poe or H.P. Lovecraft. Imagine a world without outlets for our fears, our dreams.

It’s a drab place, don’t you think? A place where people might never have considered space travel achievable, that might never have made it to the moon, let alone Mars. A place without a ticking telltale heart or a time machine.

Picture a place without Aliens, without Back to the Future and Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings. I wouldn’t want to live in that world.

My favorite thing about speculative fiction is all of it. Really. I mean that.

Because the sky is not the limit, in speculative fiction. Only our imaginations are.

Leah Rhyne is a Jersey girl who's lived in the south so long she's lost her accent...but never her attitude. Her first novel, Undead America Book 1: Zombie Days, Campfire Nights, released in October, 2012. When not writing she can be found playing with her daughter and husband, running, or drinking good red wine.

Learn more about Leah Rhyne on her website. Stay connected on Twitter.

Leah's book Undead America Book 1: Zombie Days, Campfire Nights, is available HERE.

A Moment with Samuel Marzioli

Why did you choose to write speculative fiction instead of another genre?

Perhaps it started in childhood. That always seems like the time period people dredge up to explain their current proclivities--some oddity post-infancy which maintained its edge throughout the years. And if so, who am I to go against the grain? Yes, let’s say it started in childhood, and we can blame my parents.

I was first introduced to spec fic when I was four and five. From books to movies, to comics, and books on tape, or even stories on vinyl. It was never a question for me if I would read or watch or listen. Only when. Because speculative fiction was a seamless part of my life, no different than school or bedtime, and I enjoyed it absolutely.

I remember when my family had just bought a brand new laserdisc, and we invited our family friends over for dinner and a movie. The dinner I’ve long since forgotten (maybe spaghetti?), but the movie stayed with me ever since. It was Star Wars, original and unbutchered, and--even for a kid whose idea of a great time was any 80’s video game turned cartoon--I was pretty damn impressed. Sometime later that year I remember sliding out of bed one dark night and making my way to the living room after a fit of sleeplessness. There I found my father reclining on the couch and on the TV another sci-fi film that I hadn’t seen before. I asked my dad if I could stay up and watch it too, and he said yes. That film was Ridley Scott’s Alien.

Many nights my brother and sister and I would snuggle up beside our parents in bed and they’d read us works by the masters of children’s speculative fiction: Roald Dahl, E. Nesbit, C. S. Lewis, Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum and more. Sometimes they’d even pull out a few issues from one of their many long white, and dusty, comic boxes and we’d follow along the pictures as they read to us Judge Dredd or Groo the Wanderer. In fact, it was Judge Dredd and Groo more than anything else that made me want to read. Because I soon became impatient waiting for my family to absorb the next adventure from these characters of absurdist sci-fi and ridiculous sword and sorcery, respectively.

From this groundwork, and the accumulation of a few more years, I branched off into more mature works as well. There was some H. P. Lovecraft, Poe, and Shakespeare thrown into the mix, as well as Stephen King. Maybe a few books by Clive Barker, or Michael Crichton, and of course Douglas Adams and Robert Aspirin. Probably a ton of books of pseudo histories of supernatural beasties, and various bits of parapsychology, by the likes of Harry Price, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Cesare Lombroso, and Montague Summers.

If this seems a disparate mix, it’s because that’s how it began and that’s how it continued, and to this day that’s what I write. One day I may type a tale of terror involving spilled guts with gratuitous descriptions, the next a humorous space opera involving intergalactic toys and the enthusiasts that collect them. The fact is speculative fiction is a rich and rewarding set of genres, the pixie dust that infuses the mundanity of this world with true, honest-to-God magic. And I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Anything!

‘Cept maybe a literary book deal.

Samuel Marzioli still does all of his writing on a laptop outside, under an umbrella. His fiction has appeared several times in Penumbra eMag, once in Stupefying Stories, and is forthcoming in Stupefying Stories Presents, Space & Time Magazine and the "A Darke Phantastique" anthology by Cycatrix Press.

Learn more about Samuel and his current projects from his blog.