TRY SCIENCE BABBLE IN YOUR SCIENCE FICTION

By Rex Hurst

For the three of you who know who I am, then you also know that one of the two genres I write in is science fiction. Aliens, lasers, beehive hairdo’d women saying “Show me more of this Earth thing called kissing.” This is my playground. The problem? Well, I don’t actually know much about science and what I do know all tells me that the stuff I write about in “the future” is completely impossible, or unlikely, or ridiculous. One of those.

Of course, this might not be the impediment that it appears on the surface. To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, science fiction is easier to write if you don’t  know any science. Then you aren’t limited by all sorts of nasty facts and figures, and are only hampered by a lack of imagination. Most writers aren’t big on hard science, and despite what some might claim, most science fiction readers just want to explore the fantastic without a trip back to their high school science class.

But if you want the illusion of hard science, there is a way to fake it. As science today is expanding at an incredible rate, imagine how much it will continue to do so in two to three hundred years from today. Therefore, it would be perfectly believable for new scientific terms, devices, and jargon to come into being. This is something I observed in old school episodes of Dr. Who. I’m talking about the good ones from the 1970s starring Tom Baker. In these they simply invented techo-babble to cover the fact that most of what they were doing (time travel not the least part) was preposterous. The entire series was rife with such talk and I drank it all in. If it's presented in a straightforward manner, people will instantly believe.

Science today tells us that most people’s organs would be liquified if they tried to accelerate out into the planetary orbit. Well good thing they invented the Corvala Anti-Gravity Pump or the Gravtic Analysier or the Spacio-Cotray Junction, all of which allows people to zip away into space. Try it out. Make up your own. If you get stuck, take a current product and make an anagram of that. You will surprise yourself with what you can come up with.