Madeleine Ashby has a piece on the Tor website entitled A Moral Argument for Hard Science Fiction. The main take-out quote:

All too often in fiction, we choose to batter our science and technology in a thick coating of McGuffin and then deep-fry it in a vat of boiling handwavium. But just as we should avoid an ignorant depiction of human beings whenever possible, we should also avoid ignorant depictions of science and technology — because how we discuss science and technology is inherently political.

And she has a point. In a lot of popular fiction - in print as well as on screens - science is this miracle… stuff… that is either inherently Bad or is only understood by a few Nerds Gone Bad.

He’s only mad because it’s all Mary Shelley’s fault.

Now, it has to be said that from a visual standpoint real science is B-O-R-I-N-G. It’s slow. It’s subject to review, to the mercies of failed replication of experiment… you get the idea. (Indeed, the same could be said for near-future space travel, except that failures tend to be more lethal.) At the same time, that’s what characterisation’s for.

Now, Ashby in particular nails Hackers as a culprit. I don’t remember seeing that movie, but I think I read a novelisation of it - which was pretty bad; my interpretation was that someone had heard of this ‘computer hacking’ thing and used the notion to flavour a chase movie, HollywoodOS and all. (The Wikipedia article has a synopsis that’s so cringeworthy that you don’t need to see the movie.)

But the problem she raises with depictions of this ilk is that they affect understanding - a major concern in a time when people are not taught how to tell the difference between fact and fiction. Presenting technology as mere magic isn’t good enough and, in her opinion, leads to bad policy and people being scared away from scientific disciplines.

Real science doesn’t involve sitting about in swim trunks (usually).

I’m not entirely convinced this is really the case. Yes, there’s a lot of science fiction that owes more to fairy tales than PHYS101.  But at the same time that more speculative or imaginative 'soft’ SF allows for exploring different avenues.

On the other hand, I feel a terrible dissonance when reading space operas where the characterisation doesn’t match the scale of the worlds built; lovely scenery but the actors ruin it, leaving, as Woollcott said, the taste of lukewarm parsnip juice.

SF has a difficult path to travel; to keep hope and interest in the future alive; to assure us that all our brains and our science and technology aren’t dead ends or lost causes; to assure us that even without wands or pixie dust, there is still magic in the universe, waiting in that terra incognita we know about but haven’t worked out how to reach yet.

This unfinished story will probably never be finished. It started out as an idea for a “dark science fiction” series, ripping off all manner of sources.

If anyone wants to throw large sums of money into putting this thing on screen (yeah, right), let me know.

Darkness gives way to tiny lights.

Not that it gives way all that far; just enough to reveal shape, distance, generalities. Rows of things, gleam of frost.

The things in rows look like carcasses in plastic bags, hanging on hooks from racks in the ceiling. From the floor, tubes and pipes and wires of many sorts wind up into ports and plugs in the ‘front’ of the baggy, upside down, all too human shapes; high-tech viscera in a frozen slaughterhouse. Presumably pumps are whirring and electronics hum and bleep. Not that one can hear; there is no atmosphere to carry sound to ears.

When atmosphere does arrive, it arrives in silence, too — a soundless bellow of fog from a hundred vents, racing down the racks, setting some contents swaying. At first, anyway. As the pressure rises, the sound becomes more audible, a life giving roaring. A roaring that swells and suddenly cuts out. Heating elements cut in, long hot glows, attempting to keep the newly released atmosphere from freezing to walls, racks, floors.

Now a new sound is heard: Crack of ice, shriek of unwilling hinges. Someone has opened an airlock.

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This unfinished story will probably never be finished. It started out as an idea for a “dark science fiction” series, ripping off all manner of sources.

If anyone wants to throw large sums of money into putting this thing on screen (yeah, right), let me know.

Keep reading