To: WSFAlist at keithlynch.net From: erjablow at netacc.net Subject: [WSFA] Re: Writing Technical Matters Date: Thu, 06 Feb 2003 12:37:54 EST Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net> No one expects a science fiction author to be an expert at the science he writes about. Sometimes, it is a good idea, but it should not be necessary. However, an author should have a decent respect for the subject he writes about. Many authors who would never refer to styles of Elizabethan dress or Roman quinquereme construction without consulting experts, visiting museums displaying them, or reading contemporary accounts, make no effort to present the science they write about realistically. In some cases, they end up writing anti-science fiction. One of the first stories I read was an A. E. van Vogt story that posited that each planet had its own characteristic mathematics. On Mars, they had no negative numbers. Alan Dean Foster wrote a novel set on a planet where everything was fractal-shaped, and if a human went there without special glasses, he would go mad. Nonsense. If you want to see something fractal-shaped, go look at a tree. Of course, Foster could not know any better; he's a hack. The late Robert Forward wrote a book where the aliens were extremely smart, supposedly. Forward presented them all as being great mathematicians. So, the human protagoinist asked them about the Fermat conjecture. This is forgivable, as the book was written long before the Wiles-Taylor proof. But, Forward had the aliens say something to the effect that the Fermat conjecture is the wrong question; one should ask instead whether an nth power can be the sum of fewer than n nth powers. Unfortunately for the book's credibility, somebody in the 1960s had discovered a sum of 4 fifth powers equalling a fifth power. Well, most people would not have caught that, but it shows that the author didn't ask anyone with real knowledge. This is fatal to any writing endeavor. The cloning author should not make the same mistake. Respectfully, Eric Jablow