I remember my first really bad comment on one of my stories. It was a story where I had the entire city of Chicago evacuating the city after a rather brutal alien invasion of the city. I had never really seen a mass evacuation, never really thought about the logistics behind millions of people walking down a highway toward a military base twenty miles away. I posted that chapter of a larger story on AOL's writing board and let people read and comment on it. I remember being pretty excited, I had posted a few short stories and they got some positive remarks so I was pretty confident that this epic tale would be no different. Heck, it had everything, a dynamic leader, some twists and turns, some heroism, everything I loved to read about and everything I love to write about. So, you can image my surprise when I get a very lengthy comment on the story ripping it apart line by line.
Thinking back on it now it actually wasn't that bad. The guy pretty much pointed out all the logical holes I had created, things that wouldn't be possible with so many people leaving the city. He asked good questions, how did they feed these people? How did they organize them? How did they all go to the bathroom, stuff that I really should have asked myself before writing the scene. But, at that time, 20 years or so ago when I wrote it, I was angry thinking that I didn't need to answer those kinds of questions, it was the story that was important, it was the heroes, that characters, the invasion, who cares what they ate or slept or peed. That wasn't the point!
Of course he was right, I need to ask myself questions before writing a technical scene like that. I need to figure out how to solve those kinds of problems and, since I write science fiction I can make magical solutions to the problems using science! Of course my science needs to be vaguely plausible and normally, I'm okay with that. A strange concept now could be common place in the future, I just need to nudge it in the direction of 'yeah, it could happen.'
I think I got pretty good at that. Wormholes can't open so I have to figure out a way to make it open. Okay, I saw a show on the Science Channel about Particle Accelerators and how they could accidently create Strangelets, an exotic particle that turns all other particles around it into a strangelet and could open a wormhole. Cool, that's prefect! So, I use it for my Arwen stories and it works well in the stories. Do I need to explain how we fit a particle accelerator into a starship when most of them today are miles and miles in circumference? Nah, I figured the people who are listening or reading can figure out that in 300 years we could probably scale it down to starship size so I didn't worry about that.
So, I think things through pretty well, for the most part, when I'm writing stories like this. Sometimes I'll think about it for weeks before even starting the story. I normally feel pretty confident sitting down that I can at least BS my way through the technical stuff until the second or third drafts but I can't cover everything and every time I post a story I worry if someone is going to send me an e-mail detailing why my science is wrong and why I should never write another science fiction story ever again.
I worry about that but it has never happened. When someone does comment on something I screwed up I take it in stride and move on. Heck, once it's out there it's really hard to bring it back so I just have to let the moment of stupidity hang there for everyone to see and read. And, to be honest, most of the time they're right and it forces me to think harder the next time I write a story in which a Dyson Sphere is 17 AU's in diameter. How will that affect, well, everything from its gravity signature to how close you need to be before you crash into it, how do the inhabitance live in it, stuff like that.
I love fantastic ideas and I love fantastic ideas in Science Fiction and, even if they don't make total sense when you really think about them, there really is a power to the imagination.
