Making the impossible possible

The art of writing speculative fiction is the art of making the impossible possible.  Which is what I've been doing this week with my re-write of Jade.  The original story is over fifteen years old.  I wanted to create a sentient planet that communicates with my heroine.  Plenty of sentient planets exist in SF, one of my favourites being Anne McCaffrey's Petaybee.  But Anne doesn't try to explain how that planet became sentient.  She merely states that it must have been a side-effect of the terraforming process.

When I started my re-write of Jade I decided I wanted to try and explain the planet's sentience as far as possible in terms of known science.  And this is where the big difference lies from that original draft.  My knowledge of the science and procedures I needed to know was extremely sketchy fifteen years ago.  I didn't have easy Internet access then, it was before the era of broadband in the UK.  Researching the many and diverse topics I needed to know to make the planet work was near-impossible then.  And some of the science I've appropriated for the story, like crystal storage mediums for computers and DNA computing, didn't even exist back then.

Fifteen years ago it wasn't easy to research submarine diving procedures, how CDs were made, or how a planet's thermohaline circulation works.  Now all that information is readily available on-line.  Also in that period the depths to which such submarines can dive has extended enormously.  We've now explored the deepest places in our oceans.  We've discovered the communities of animals that congregate around the scalding water given off by black smokers.  And we used to think, before discovering the creatures who live down there, that all life needed sunlight to survive.

Being able to easily access all this knowledge has meant I've been able to deliver on the challenge I've set myself to make the impossibility of Jade possible.  I know how the planimal and ocean exchange data, and I know how the ocean writes that data into its Fire Crystal storage centres.  There are a few things that have defeated me, one of which is working out how the ocean retrieves its stored memories.  But it turns out that researchers don't really know how humans retrieve their stored memories either, so I'm not going to worry about that.

The other thing I can't explain is how heroine Kaath can communicate with the planimal and ocean telepathically.  Part of it is her unique genetics, but the other half is pure science fiction.  And I am writing fiction after all, so I feel well satisfied with what I have achieved in making the impossible possible.

The segue into hard SF

I've always thought of myself as a soft SF writer, but recently I've had to re-examine that label for myself.  In the novella I've just re-written I've included hypercapnia, submarine diving procedures, data about light absorption in the ocean, and the production of Omega 3 and 6 oils from algal sources.

Hard and soft SF have never been absolute and self-contained, of course.  They've always been a continuum from stories where the tech or science drives everything, to stories where it is faintly in the background, or even not acknowledged. 

In the past I think I've called myself a soft SF writer because I didn't want someone to ask me what kind of scientist I was.  But one of the changes I've found in the last twenty years is that scientists have made great efforts to explain their work to the public in understandable terms.  "Popular science" books now take up a large amount of shelf space in bookshops.  I have a fair collection of them, books on DNA and epigenetics, cell biology, space and hyperspace, and a large number of pages stored on my iPad of research I've done while writing.

I've discovered that I prefer researching on the run.  I write mainly in cafés, and my favourites are places which have wi-if so I can research as I write.  The novella which I've recently completed saw me researching several disparate subjects.  Since I bought an iPad I've found it invaluable for researching on the run.  I will write to a certain place and then wonder what the science is on a particular subject.  And it's now so easy to do an internet search for data.

The ubiquitous Wikipedia always comes to the rescue.  I know we're always warned against relying on that data alone, but it's the matter of a few minutes to cross-check the data I find with academic, government, or research websites and confirm its validity.

As a result my stories have begun to take on more science elements.  Where twenty years ago I might have fudged the science, now today I can do an Internet search and find out how that really works.  Scientists have had to become "popularisers" of their work, and I can usually find a layman's explanation for even the most esoteric areas.  All of which has made it easy for my stories to segue into harder science.