Category: Science

What if?

That is the central question in scifi and the cause of all the trouble too. Trouble means tension and conflict. In fiction, trouble is good.

One of the things I really wanted to get away from was the Star Trek “alien.” The Star Trek alien is just like a human except for one, or a few, altered physical features (purple eyes, wrinkled nose, differently shaped ears) and one exaggerated behavior or attribute—greed for the Ferengi, logic for the Vulcans, aggression for the Klingons. Until recently all Vulcans even shared one hairstyle.

Practically you can see why this would happen. It makes it easy on the makeup department and allows the casting department to cast, well, humans. Duh. Budget constraints are a factor of course, even with the prevalence of CGI. We finally are a point where we have actors walking around on stilts to create the illusion of hooves like a horse, etc.

Low-budget old-school Dr. Who was braver and gave us aliens/monsters made up of baling wire and spit. Ironically, also due to budget constraints. There’s a lesson there.

That’s all fine and good and eventually Star Trek writers even came up with an explanation for why there are so many bipedal humanoid species—some race went around seeding planets and reused the same framework. Okay. That kinda, sorta explains things, but what about behavior? That’s actually more writing-related too, having to do with the readers.

The readers (or viewers) must be able to relate to the alien. Hence we do not have the Broccoli people of Brassica IV except maybe for the short term as a curiosity or if the budget allows it, or just to be able to say, “Hey we don’t just have bipedal humanoid aliens with front-facing eyes.”

Let’s face it, consumers may get a chuckle out of the Brassicans’ obsessions with butter-baths, but could we really relate to it if it didn’t touch the funny (or irony) bone?

Now, if you think about it, an intelligent creature that looked like a stalk of broccoli because it had sensors on the stalks or operated each branch like an octopus does with multiple brains would be quite unique and might even make sense for a certain kind of environment, but how relatable would it be?

And then we have the Furry-aliens, i.e. people in suits made up to look like a shark’s head was grafted atop a human torso, because, well, it was. I really wanted to get away from that, and the truth is, once I made that decision, I was limited to creating a sub-species of human, which I was actually fine with given what I wanted to do.

In addition to it working with the story I was inspired to write, I think that going with a sub-species is more honest than pretending that you could have a shark-headed humanoid. Ironically, it’s actually done better in fantasy (via orcs, ogres, vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural creatures which are more rigorous, i.e. it makes more sense, than the shark-furry). This is also why I’m fine with calling the RoH series a “space fantasy” or a “space opera” rather than hard-SF, despite the crunchiness of the science or the rigor of internal consistency. 

Remember, I’m here to entertain. As I’ve been saying, I’m filing for copyrights, not patents.

Once I made the decision to go with the more rigorous notion of a sub-species, I delved into what I loosely call genetic engineering (mostly the old-fashioned kind that is actually in-vivo breeding for traits and/or hybridization rather than the in-vitro variety, although I use both in Ravages of Honor series (affiliate link)).

Enter the mules. Wait, did she say mules? As in the four-legged things like horses.

Yes, she did! Cause she’s like that.

Because a mule has only 63 chromosomes (a horse has 64 and a donkey has 62), mules are infertile. Usually. I know! I was shocked to learn this too. I thought for sure that mules could not have babies. 

And that’s when the trouble started.

What if? What if the super-soldiers (my genetically engineered donai) were like mules? This would be a desirable trait since their creators wouldn’t want them breeding anyway. So I went down this rabbit hole and discovered that there are rare cases where the offspring of a fertile female mule ( a “mare”) can have fertile offspring that then go on to exhibit (atavistic expression I believe; remember, I’m not a geneticist or even a biologist) the traits/characteristics of horses despite their heritage including donkeys. That is, it’s possible to breed fertility back into the genome and to have those offspring express only the “desirable” traits of one species (or race).

Talk about things that make this writer’s day! This is my playground. This is where my buttons are pushed (and like a 747 I have a lot of them; go figure).

In the RoH universe this manifested as the genetically engineered donai having been created in such a way that they were infertile, but “nature finds a way” and produced errors—sometimes in the genome a la chromosomes, sometimes in the symbiotic nanites via coding errors. Sometimes those “errors” were helped along by the most successful venereal disease on record—life. Yes, life is a venereal disease, even when it occurs in-vitro (in a test tube). Pass it on!

Scientists can play with test-tubes all they like, even en masse, but there’s nothing like the introduction of chaos (the scientific variety) that’s unleashed when the product, in this case, the donai, are released into the wild and have the opportunity to—ahem—interact with a far more prolific species, i.e. humans. 

And this is where another “What if?” came in and then all the trouble called a story, called conflict, called complex characters, called intense relationships, called massive worldbuilding “happened.”

If a story can’t be told without the extrapolation of science, it’s science fiction. 

If a story has a premise based in that extrapolation of science (mine has three), then it’s science fiction. 

If a story has a solution rooted in the same extrapolation, then it’s science fiction. 

Which still leaves open the question of sub-genre.

RoH meets all those criteria (requisite girl cooties notwithstanding). So what is it then? Hard science fiction, science fantasy, or space opera. I guess it all depends on your perspective, i.e. how much do you really care about the science being right, the science being rigorous, internally consistent, etc.

From my perspective it’s got enough handwavium and other elements (i.e. it’s not just about the technology but about people and their adventures) to be space opera. It’s also space opera because the donai are more like the creatures of fantasy despite their non-supernatural basis. In many ways they are more human than human, but the story solution resting in the “rigor” of the story’s in-vivo genetic engineering makes it sci-fi (maybe even hard sci-fi). 

Unlike a lot of space opera (I’m looking at you Star Trek) RoH is actual military-sf rather than militaristic-sf. But I don’t have a lot (I have a few) of space battles because I find them boring to read and even more boring to write. Nevertheless, I also don’t appropriate military culture (uniforms, ranks) and then disrespect them (bedding subordinates and making them into a “peacekeeping armada”—what an absurd term! Think about it!) because I know better. My militaries kill people and break things, just like (checks notes) in the real world. Huh. More rigor. 

This is why I call myself  genre-fluid. I don’t set out to mix genres, but I do mix them, depending on what the in-world dynamics call for. I think this enriches the world and provides depth to characters. It’s what makes an enjoyable story to me and I hope, to you, my readers.

Please don’t put any spoilers in any comments. I will delete anything I consider spoilerish.

[Crossposted to Substack]

One of the reasons I’m doing this short series on the science in my books is because I wish more scifi writers would talk about what’s real science and what’s made up in their stories so that people won’t grow up thinking that Star Trek (ST) science is real. One of the reason I like reading certain historical fiction writers like Kate Quinn and Allison Pataki is because they go into what is made up and what was based on historical “facts.” As a non-historian I appreciate knowing. I’m hoping that the same will happen for what I’m discussing here.

And here we go…

Most people (based on what I’ve seen) got their idea about nanotechnology from Star Trek. My introduction to it was somewhat different. ST:TNG had not yet hit television when I ran across Feynman’s There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom (a 1959 lecture on “miniaturization” that is considered the basis for the concept) via Engines of Creation, the first book I ever checked out of a college library. 

[The big bugaboo about this lecture on “miniaturization” was in its interpretation, i.e. what Feynman meant vs what people “understood.” He was not talking about miniaturization in the sense of making smaller and smaller versions of something, i.e. as in using the photolithography used to make semiconductors.1 The image above demonstrates this misunderstanding in action. That robot up there looks like a macro (real world) scale robot, something that has been scaled down.]

One of the reasons I made my Ravages of Honor series (affiliate link) into a space opera was so that I could focus on the characters, their adventures and relationships, the politics of a galactic empire, and the political machinations of feuding noble Houses. And so that I could use handwavium (i.e. make stuff up).

As with most things I set out to do, things don’t always turn out the way I intended. There’s a reason I chose the slogan, “human drives, not hyperdrives” so I was surprised to find out that my handwavium (my science) was considered pretty crunchy after all.

And actually, I’m okay with this. Like most writers, I ended up writing something I wanted to read—something that hit all of my buttons just right, and I have a lot of them. I want character-based stories with romantic elements (like chivalry and romance, not Romance) as well as handwavium that makes sense in-universe. I wanted to explore the question of “What makes us human?” as well as the cost and price of honor, i.e. of doing the right thing. I wanted to look what makes freedom and liberty and tyranny. I wanted to look at cultural clashes.

I consider the FTL in RoH to be the least crunchy element of my handwavium, but maybe it’s not. When a writer friend pointed this one, I had to shrug and then nod and go off and think about it some.

One of the reasons I don’t go into huge info-dumps in RoH is because as a reader, I find them quite boring. The characters don’t need to explain things to themselves (how often do you stop to explain to yourself how your car works?) and even when we contrive a reason to explain things to an ingenue, it comes across as authorial intrusion of the worst kind.

Even if the character being used as a mouth-piece is actually an expert (in this case, an n-space expert) he has to have a good reason to “explain” things to another character. Then we have the level of explanation. If a differential geometer (someone who is mathematician specializing in differential geometry) were to explain something to a layman, would they use all the terms-of-art unique to differential geometry? The answer of course is no, so vomiting that on the page is again, pure authorial intrusion.

My definition of science fiction is not just that it has to have a speculative element (like nanotechnology or FTL or genetic engineering) but that such elements have to be integral to the story, i.e. it can’t happen without it. It can’t just be window dressing or a thin veneer. There must be a speculative element that is integral to the story in such a way that taking it away kills the story. If the story solution depends on it, so much the better, and by the way, now you may have well crossed into “hard” sci-fi, whether you intended to or not.

The Ravages of Honor series (affiliate link) has three such elements: FTL, nanotechnology, and genetic engineering. Take any of these elements away and there can be no story. Without FTL, Syteria can’t get pulled out of her part of the universe and find herself in Darien’s. Without FTL, there is no Imperium. Without genetic engineering and nanotechnology, the donai cannot exist.

I think the genetic engineering in my series is actually the most speculative element, followed by the nanotech, but that’s probably more of a reflection on the fact that my education is the most lacking in the genetic engineering aspect, whereas I do have a better grasp of how nanotechnology would work just like I have a better but still tenuous (theoretical) grasp on the math and physics of “hyperspace” (as in the space of higher dimensions, not the x, y, and z of our own physical universe; oh, and t (time) of course, but let’s leave t’ (the prime of time) out of this, cause yeah, let’s just leave it out).

I apologize in advance for making physicists cringe and for making lay people think about math, but I promise, no equations. I also apologize for the quality of my graphics. It was either spend ten minutes drawing it by hand or the next few days trying to figure out how to make the same image via some program I haven’t used in years, and I have a release coming up tomorrow (10/20/23). Yikes! 

So here it is, the quick and dirty, and not very technical version of my FTL handwavium.

It requires you to imagine the space between stars (just like in our universe) as a surface. If we were to look at a surface edge-on, we’d get a line. 

What constitutes a region A as different from region B is part of the speculative element here. Let’s call it any region of space that is gravitationally connected in some way, like a solar system or a cluster of stars and their solar systems.

Now imagine that this line (that represents a surface) has some curvature to it that can be represented mathematically (if not physically) via the surface (and surface only) of a sphere. 

Kind of like this:

So, what we have here is much like two soap bubbles that have been brought together and can touch, thereby creating an interface. 

That interface is what connects region A to region B, in hyperspace (as in the space of higher dimensions).

What does that interface itself actually look like?

It’s an intersection where region A and region B “touch,” thus creating a “phase-point” connecting the regions and therefore providing a way to travel from star C to star D hyperspatially. This phase-point might look like a disk you can pass through.

Everyone with a physics background, stop cringing. It’s called science “fiction” for a reason.

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This is why the territory of any particular House in the RoH universe isn’t necessarily connected in real space. The n-space (phase-point) connections are the defining factor instead. And if one wants to travel through a phase-point that is located physically in another House’s territory, they must have permission or enough power not to worry about getting permission. This is part of the reason why we have a feudal system in this far-future universe, i.e. because one of the elements of a feudal system is that communication and/or travel is slow and/or difficult. Messages must also travel through these phase-points or take years or decades or centuries to arrive. 

Now, imagine if you will, what happens when those bubbles move further or closer or get pushed apart. It would change the dynamics of alliances, both political and economic. Fertile ground for any space opera. 

Especially this one (release date 10/20/23):

[Crossposted to Substack]