JeffKirvin.net

There’s an interesting article over on Wired about Hollywood’s inability to get science right in the movies. It got me thinking about how hard I try to keep the science believable in my stories, and who I’m really doing that for.

The project I’m working on now, Ghost Ronin, has been tumbling around in my brain for the better part of two decades. One of the problems I’ve had is keeping the science fiction fictional. For example, when I came up with the idea in the mid 80s, I thought it would be really cool if Mike had a receiver in his helmet that triangulated his position, bearing and speed anywhere in the world based on signals from a military network of geosynchronous satellites. I’d never heard of GPS at the time, but now this gee-whiz feature of Mike’s high-tech armor is duplicated in the smartphone I use for writing about it. And don’t get me started on what I could have done back then with Google Earth.

Most of the tech I used back then, like ceramic armor, myomers in place of muscles, GPS and more, has become real, at least in the lab. In the new version, I’ve got a whole new collection of science stuff powering Mike’s adventures: armor woven from synthetic spiderweb, regenerative nanotech, reinforcing bones from the inside out. I’ve also added concepts from Zen meditation, the increasing reliance by our defense department on independent contractors, and the resemblance of modern multinational corporations to feudal states to the mix. It should be an entertaining book, and part of what I like about it is that it should be just plausible enough to feel real, like it might really happen. Like it might have happened already, on some black budget line item.

But that brought me to wondering who I’m doing this for. It’s important to me that I get this right. That I get the science right, the military culture of Army rangers right, the political in-fighting of defense contractors right. But why?

Since I started writing again, it’s been with the idea that I’m writing because I want to write. I’m writing these books because I want to read them. If they’re published or not doesn’t matter to me, or shouldn’t. Because if I start writing with the goal of publication, it’s going to become work, all the fun will go out of it and I’ll do whatever I can to avoid it. So why is it so important to me that my science fiction be plausible, even to geeks like me who understand the science?

Or is that precisely the point? I want to get it right because I’m writing it for me, because I’ll know if I’m bullshitting the reader? Is it enough to tell the emotional truth of your characters, or does telling the truth as a writer apply to everything?