When I was a child I used to read a lot. Still do, though my tastes have changed just a little. But from the age of eight to fifteen I would read any piece of fantastic literature I could get my hands on. Comics were of course a favorite, and I would even read the letters to the editor in the back of each one. I remember one in particular in The Incredible Hulk. The writer commented on how it was impossible for the Hulk to pick up a castle and throw it at the army he was fighting. Not because he wasn’t strong enough. No, the Hulk was that powerful. Instead the writer, who was an engineering student at some major University, commented on how the structure itself would not hold together while lifted out of the ground by a pair of hands, no matter how over sized. The structure, which had been designed to sit on a large flat piece of ground, would fall apart, and the Hulk would find himself holding onto a couple of handfuls of stone while the castle fell in pieces on him and around him. And of course he would get even more pissed, but even the anger of the green beast couldn’t change the laws of physics. I also remember, though at a latter age, how Larry Niven fielded questions from engineering students about the properties of Scrinth, the marvelous substance that was the matrix of Ringworld. Someone had done the math and shown that it was impossible for a structure of any conceivable matter to hold together under the forces it had to endure. Niven had commented that it was almost impossible to come up with some high tech idea that someone couldn’t shoot down. Another famous example of a fan finding fault through factual analysis was the famous treatise on the power of the Death Star. You know, the moon sized station from Star Wars that could totally destroy Earth sized planets with a one second blast. This analysis has appeared in many places on the net, and the analyzer, who I think was a physics student, took into account the force of gravity, mass of the planet, and many other factors. Definitely something I couldn’t have done. He found that to totally destroy an Earth sized planet, meaning to blast it into pieces that did not fall back into a globe and form a new, if somewhat lifeless, planet, required half the energy produced by the sun for a year. The author made a remark about the capacitors of the Death Star, but plainly he was pointing out that such a weapon was impossible using any kind of tech as we understood it.
Now I try to make my work as technically factual as possible, as long as it doesn’t destroy a good story. I was trained in psychology, with a minor and some more in biology. I still know enough physics and chemistry to not make any huge errors, I hope. And some things I just put down to faith that we will solve insurmountable problems, at least problems for our current tech. I used inertial compensators in spaceships, with no idea how they would work, because they are necessary to advance the story. I figure that inertia would be converted to heat, so now I have another problem, like how to get rid of all that heat. I hand wave it away, because I figure that it will either be solved or not. But again I try to make whatever is factual in the story fit the known facts. No magical fifth or sixth fundamental forces of nature. Then I read the work of other authors, some of them doing quite well, and the responses of their readers, and wonder why I even bother. I might find the mistakes in the works of others, but the fans either do not or don’t care if they do.
A couple of years ago I was reading a series by a well known writer about an interstellar conflict started by turning a gas giant into a star. Now the technology used seemed a little over the top, but who can say it was not possible, moving a neutron star through a wormhole into the heart of the gas giant. Now I believe the result would have been to add the mass of the gas giant to the outside of the neutron star as a new layer of neutronium, but in the story the compression resulted in the gas giant sustaining fusion and becoming the life giving light to its moons. I guess it could happen. But the error that destroyed my suspension of belief was that the new gas giant/star, which now had a mass much greater than the star it orbited, was still orbiting that star. What I am sure would have happened is that solar system would have rearranged its orbits to compensate for the greater mass that now ruled the system. I wondered how many people actually caught that error, and how many cared who did. More recently I read a novel in which the premise was that colony ships had been sent to nearby stars because an asteroid was about to hit the Earth. Now from what I have read, most experts agree that once we have gotten interplanetary travel pretty much under control we will not have to worry about random rocks striking the Earth. We will detect them and we will move them. So it didn’t make sense that we would have interstellar travel, even sublight, and have to worry about a rock striking the Earth, especially if it gives us enough time to equip ten expeditions to other stars. Now I was surprised that a book would be based on such a poor premise, but I was even more surprised by some of the reviews of this book, in which readers said it was based on such a believable premise. I guess they don’t read the views of the experts on the future dangers of asteroid strikes.
Now all writers make mistakes. The physicists make errors with biology, the biologists with physics, and on and on. I try to make my work as accurate as possible within the constraints of the story. I will still use handwavium or unobtanium when necessary to move the story forward. I will not make people float off a world for no know reason, or fighters bank in vacuum, or G class stars go supernova as part of their natural evolution. I know I will make mistakes, and hope that my readers point them out in a non-obnoxious manner. But reading some of the things I have read, and seeing what is put on the screen, silver and small, makes me wonder if anyone really cares. I know that I do, and I will continue to try to make my stories make sense.