I’ve been watching some videos from Sci-Fi Odyssey over on YouTube recently, not really because I find them to be great, but because I’ve been bored. That’s not to say that they’re bad, because certainly, they’re not, I just find his take on things to be “interesting”. I say it like that because I simply do not agree with some of his overarching ideas. He seems to think, again, from my limited exposure, that science fiction must, by necessity, be hard, meaning it’s got to be scientifically plausible to be worthwhile.
That’s not how it works, though.
This came up mostly in a video he did on “classic” sci-fi vs. “new” sci-fi, I’ll link to it right here if you want to take a look. He said that he had to have an entirely different set of standards for “old stuff” because scientific advancements have made it hard for him to take it seriously because it was “wrong”.
That’s a really stupid way to look at things.
I’ve said this before, but everything is a product of its time. Everything. Every book, every movie, every TV show, it all represents the reality of the time in which it was made. It’s a snapshot of the views and beliefs and knowledge that existed in that moment and always will be. It doesn’t change. It doesn’t evolve. It doesn’t grow. It will always be what it was when it was created. People need to deal with it.
He talked about it to some degree, which I appreciated, but it seems like he, like a lot of young people these days, has a real problem setting aside their modern preconceptions and just dealing with the words on the page. He seems to have a very specific idea of what sci-fi is and that’s just wrong.
Science-fiction isn’t about space travel. It’s not about flying faster than the speed of light. Jurassic Park is science fiction and there isn’t a spaceship to be found. In fact, pretty much all the works of Michael Crichton were sci-fi, and he never left the planet, that I recall.
Likewise, unless you’re talking about hard sci-fi, which is what he seems to favor, “scientific accuracy” is pretty irrelevant. So long as the concepts are consistent throughout, it doesn’t matter.
He does a video on FTL and throughout; he describes various methods that people have used and then says, “it doesn’t violate the laws of relativity” as though that matters. It’s not the methodology but the consistency that does. There are all kinds of sci-fi books out there that use methods for moving faster than light that are utterly ludicrous in the real world, yet they remain sci-fi. He talks about the two methods in Dune and both are just… impossible. You’ve got folding space, piloted by drugged-up Navigators. The “old version”, which is simply described as “outracing photons” is also ludicrous, yet Dune has become a classic because it’s not about the technology, it’s about the story.
If everything in science fiction had to be scientifically plausible, you wouldn’t have very much science fiction, would you? It’s about entertaining the reader using concepts that are, at least hypothetically plausible and it doesn’t have to be that plausible. He brought up John Scalzi’s Interdependency series, where he just yanked the whole idea of “The Flow” out of his ass. It’s a giant river in space. There is nothing scientific about it, yet it works for the purpose intended. It helps him to tell an engaging tale. That’s all that matters.
The point is that you don’t have to be a scientist to write science fiction. Certainly, if you’re writing about something scientifically significant, you should do your research, but “being accurate” doesn’t matter that much, so long as you are consistent. H.G. Wells wasn’t “accurate” by modern standards, yet he wrote some of the most classic books of all time. You don’t need accuracy so long as you can spin a compelling yarn that people like to read.
That’s all it takes. Get to it!
