The story comes first

This week I led a Writing Science Fiction workshop for my local literary fesrival.  My workshop attendees were a varied bunch, and interestingly, I had more women than men.  None of them were existing science fiction writers, but were intrigued by the genre and willing to give it a go.

All except one woman, who revealed herself to be a space scientist.  She seemed inrent on picking holes in some of my ideas about world-building, but when it came to the writing exercises she huddled behind her laptop.  I'm not sure if she actually wrote any fiction, as she was the only person in the group who refused to read out what she'd done.   She couldn't seem to grasp that we were writing fiction and not delivering peer-reviewed science papers.

Science Fiction is becoming an ever-broader genre.  The traditional hard SF story is now only one part of a much broader genre.  The "soft" social sciences are every bit as important to the genre,  and often we fudge the science to get the story to work.  Because we're writing fiction, not fact.

It worries me when a career scientist gets so locked up in the technicalities of their science that they can't step over the threshold and consider the impact of it on our civilisation, or on the other creatures we share our planet with.  Just as great storytelling needs a dose of dreaming, so does great science, an ability to see beyond the rigid borders of the discipline and imagine how that knowledge will change the future.

I'm currently re-editing my novel Jade.  It has a planimal and ocean in symbiosis, and I'm trying to work out a semi-plausible way in which it can collect and store data.  I've hijacked the ocean's thermohaline circulation to do that.  I've also got an "impossible" human/alien hybrid that I'm doing my best to justify.

I've tried to make the known science work.  And ithat's been wide-ranging, from photosynthesis to how viruses transmit themselves, to the composition of atmospheres and submarine diving procedures.  I've done a lot of research to make the planet seem plausible.  The idea is that the whole planet is alive, in a form of sentience that hasn't been seen before.  And, necessarily, when something hasn't been seen before, known science breaks down.

And that's where I differ from that space scientist.  I can switch off the science brain and tell the story,  Because, after all, I'm a storyteller, and ultimately the story comes first,