can you just own the tech level?

I defined, ie built, my world first then added characters, etc. I have a more or less three sentence back story that explains the why and wherefore of how my characters, world, got to be the way it is, and yes there's space travel, etc.

That said I write as a hobby I'm a professional fine artist, so can't really tell you if I'm doing it right or not. I suggest reading lots of scifi/fantasy and see how others are doing setting things up in their worlds.

I've been reading scif/f since I was knee high to a grasshopper so yeah, get reading would be my suggestion, it's also Stephen Kings suggestion in his book On Writing.

aguywhotypes said:

ahhh a professional fine artist..
so am I. I paint the abstract.

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read Stephen Kings book "On Writing", it'll save you a lot of angst and you may even find it encouraging.

If your book isn't about how people reached this tech level, then you don't need specific details on interplanetary drives or such. For consistency's sake, get your terminology straight and keep notes (so you don't suddenly contradict your own worldbuilding - say, by suddenly having artificial gravity on your mining ships when you previously established it wasn't cost-effective, or something like that), but don't feel obligated to get a doctorate in planetary physics first, let alone infodump on the reader. After all, the average human being probably doesn't know the precise workings behind our modern infrastructure; we know that when we hit the switch the light comes on, and when we press the accelerator the car goes faster, but that's about all we need to know to get on with our lives, which are usually focused on other things (unless we forget to pay the power bill, or the accelerator stops making the car move.) So long as you don't make any glaring errors - people breathing freely in outer space, or all planets revolving around the Earth - the audience will be willing to go along for the ride.

That said, a little light research wouldn't hurt. But if it's the tech isn't the point of the story - if it's more about a young woman clawing her way to the top of the interplanetary corporate ladder, or a brewing war, or a forbidden love affair, or something else - don't go overboard.

So long as you clue people into these normal thing very early they will just accept them. If you take too long they tend to get surprised and annoyed when the bus to Mars suddenly gets mentioned.

it depends on your story. Star Wars has easy space travel without a lot of explanation. But I've heard that described as Space Opera not Sci Fi. As long as it's not hard scifi I think you are fine.

aguywhotypes said:

I want to write a story, I have no idea how long it will be. Might even turn into an interactive fiction story.

I want to just start out with the following as everyday standard procedures.

1. space travel is easy.. like how we hop on jets to go from Miami to London.. we could travel to mars, jupiter etc.

2. we are now mining asteroids for fuels and minerals.

my question is do I have to explain any of this? or can I just 'own' it and state it like this is normal life now and then off I go with the story.

thanks

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Try this:

How often do you think about how your cell phone works, and if you think of that at all, how deeply? Or about the jet turbine, the aerodynamics, the electronics, that operate to make you able to fly a jet from Rome to Mumbai? If you think of it, at what level?

If something is everyday, treat it as everyday. As a reader of Science Fiction/Fantasy, I don't mind "black box" tech.

Read Philip K Dick - he rarely bothers to explain the concept but lets the story rule. Wish I could manage it.

Personally, I would at least put in a sentence or two of "explanation" along the lines of "after the invention of the Zeem-Zoom Engine in 2043, space travel became vastly easier and cheaper."

The main reason space travel is so difficult, after all, is that building and maintaining rocket engines is so expensive. If you can just establish that a new and better kind of rocket has been invented, that should be enough to set the scene even if you give no actual explanation of how that rocket works.

Kevin Nelson said:

Personally, I would at least put in a sentence or two of "explanation" along the lines of "after the invention of the Zeem-Zoom Engine in 2043, space travel became vastly easier and cheaper."

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It's probably a good idea to give a little background, but I'd try to work it in a bit more naturally. If your POV character would think about that, work it in, but most people don't think about things like that.

For "lighter" science fiction, readers don't really care so much how things are done. The technology is simply a vehicle to tell the story.

Kevin Nelson said:

If you can just establish that a new and better kind of rocket has been invented, that should be enough to set the scene even if you give no actual explanation of how that rocket works.

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This is mostly true, but even with extremely powerful and efficient Newtonian spaceships, interplanetary travel is still going to be a big deal (have to consider open launch windows and travel time in weeks at the very least) and interstellar is right out. Granted you could gloss over the remaining difficulties in some way, but it is possible to treat space travel as normal with some effort. I like to see it as early 20th century ocean liner travel-- lengthy and uncommon for most, but not so dangerous that only an extreme minority ever do it.

If you go up a little higher in tech level to the Mass Effect style, it approaches being completely routine in daily life. With FTL travel, you just zip around wherever you'd like without having to concern yourself with the issues brought up by orbital mechanics. At this point it would be no more of a grand adventure than taking an airplane flight.

You probably could, assuming the rest of the story is interesting enough. It depends on what place the space travel has in the story, how often people do it, etc.

I think you need one level of explanation. A thing wot makes it work. A black box. A macguffin. That black box doesn't need to be explained, but it probably does need to be there.

Take Star Wars. All the spaceships had engines, control panels and some sort of fuel. That's one link of explanation. We can relate to it because we know that engines make things move ... even if we don't know how.

George Lucas said that he imagined the Millennium Falcon as Han Solo's hot rod. Home-grown mods, and just low tech enough that he can work on it himself with a box of spanners. How does it work? Heck, we don't know. But it's got engines and stuff, so it's conceivable that it might work.

Star Trek was similar, but leant more on nautical themes than automotive technology. We had Scotty in the engine room stoking the boilers - until those all too frequent times when all the senior crew had beamed down to the planet leaving him in charge. And again we have one link of explanation. Big engines move a big ship, just like on the Titanic.

Star Trek Nex Gen followed the same principles but added a new wrinkle of diverting power from system A to system B. And if things got really hairy, that included diverting power away from life support. I have no idea how that would work in practice, but I could understand it. That and emitting different types of doohickeys from the deflector dish. Always the deflector dish. If ever I get round to designing a starship I'd have two or three deflector dishes. They seemed so darned useful...

Iain Bank's Culture novels had ship Minds. Again, we don't need to know exactly how they work. Just one link is usually enough. In this case, they are computers and we all know what computers can do.

FTL travel? That is usually solved by just one link of explanation. Star Trek's warp speed, Star Wars' hyperdrive, Stargates. We don't need to get intensely technical about how each thing works. Just one plausible explanation is usually enough.

Sci fi tends to struggle if it shows the technology without the black box. I trust Star Trek and Star Wars when they tell me that their engines work. I would have much more of a credibility problem if they didn't have engines or they were powered by something I didn't recognise.

Scifi also gets into trouble if it shows something that can't be credibly explained by a super-advanced technology that hasn't been invented yet but could conceivably be invented one day. I can believe that Han Solo could be frozen in Carbonite, because I have no idea what Carbonite is or what it can do. It's possible that it could keep you alive.

But I don't believe that Sandra Bullock would have survived in Gravity. Impressive tech at some point in the future - that's okay. Basic problems with the laws of physics - nah.

All of that said, some of the best scenes in Dune are the explanations of space travel using Spice. So if you WANT to go into detailed descriptions, SF readers will love it.

Ok, no idea how long it will be? That makes it a rough draft. Get ready. Get set. GO! Write in your journal everyday, call them sci-fi fragments if you like. One day you'll have to figure out the plot but as for getting your ideas down, go!

Easy space travel and mining asteroids. That's space opera, a sub-genre of sci-fi, closely related to military sci-fi. Here are the ten rules of space opera. Break them and risk being not-awesome. http://io9.com/5965187/top-ten-rules-of-space-opera

Another sub-genre to check out is planetary romance. It's when space opera drops it's pagentry and climactic struggles. I'm also thinking Cowboy Bebop an animae tv show. They were bounty hunters flitting planet to planet. They treaded the line between space opera and traveling town to town tv dude show.

So, your characters will go system to system mining asteroids and solving people's problems? You could have fun describing asteroid composition and unfair trade practice.

Waldo said:

Easy space travel and mining asteroids. That's space opera, a sub-genre of sci-fi, closely related to military sci-fi. Here are the ten rules of space opera. Break them and risk being not-awesome. http://io9.com/5965187/top-ten-rules-of-space-opera

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Shit, I think I've broken all these rules already. Especially Rule 3. Both my protagonists and antagonists have spent quite a bit of time hiding in their apartments. They might get to visit some shiny moon bases later, though.

aguywhotypes said:

I want to write a story, I have no idea how long it will be. Might even turn into an interactive fiction story.

I want to just start out with the following as everyday standard procedures.

1. space travel is easy.. like how we hop on jets to go from Miami to London.. we could travel to mars, jupiter etc.

2. we are now mining asteroids for fuels and minerals.

my question is do I have to explain any of this? or can I just 'own' it and state it like this is normal life now and then off I go with the story.

thanks

Click to expand...

It depends on the role those two aspects of the world play in your story.

Cathy C said:

All of that said, some of the best scenes in Dune are the explanations of space travel using Spice.

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Oh hell I'd forgotten about that

Cathy C said:

All of that said, some of the best scenes in Dune are the explanations of space travel using Spice. So if you WANT to go into detailed descriptions, SF readers will love it.

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That's because space travel using Spice is different from most space travel, as usually depicted.

Waldo said:

Here are the ten rules of space opera. Break them and risk being not-awesome. http://io9.com/5965187/top-ten-rules-of-space-opera

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Albedo said:

Shit, I think I've broken all these rules already. Especially Rule 3. Both my protagonists and antagonists have spent quite a bit of time hiding in their apartments. They might get to visit some shiny moon bases later, though.

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I feel like that article should be retitled "top ten tired cliches of space opera", but I can't quite tell whether the whole thing is supposed to be satire or not.

aguywhotypes said:

I want to just start out with the following as everyday standard procedures.

1. space travel is easy.. like how we hop on jets to go from Miami to London.. we could travel to mars, jupiter etc.

2. we are now mining asteroids for fuels and minerals.

my question is do I have to explain any of this? or can I just 'own' it and state it like this is normal life now and then off I go with the story.

Click to expand...

If you just own it, it works. As previously mentioned, many people don't think about how computers work or how electricity travels through wire. Technology just exists and work as described.

That being said, one of my pet peeves in sci-fi is when an author has a standard for some sort of future tech and changes it/forgets it/contradicts it halfway through the novel
(e.g. if you can hop on a ship and get to Mars easily, don't suddenly claim it would take forever to get to Venus unless there is an explanation about why the closer planet would take longer).

kuwisdelu said:

I feel like that article should be retitled "top ten tired cliches of space opera", but I can't quite tell whether the whole thing is supposed to be satire or not.

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Yeah, that's satire. And pretty funny, too! It's like the writer wants to make George Lucas cry...

kuwisdelu said:

I feel like that article should be retitled "top ten tired cliches of space opera", but I can't quite tell whether the whole thing is supposed to be satire or not.

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jjdebenedictis said:

Yeah, that's satire. And pretty funny, too! It's like the writer wants to make George Lucas cry...

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It's definitely satire. A bit over-done in some places, under-done in others. But definitely intended to be satire.

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