Science With and Without Science

Science Without Science

Only a handful of days left for the awesome SF Storybundle The Cauldron is featured in. I figured I’d take another stab at promoting the book and the others offered with it. I love science fiction, and I’m currently reading Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Buried Deep, and plan on starting Charles Gannon’s Fire With Fire next. Oh, I’ll read all of them. I love science fiction.

Take a look at the collection: https://storybundle.com/scifi

I have a science background, but nothing that helped much writing The Cauldron with Gene DeWeese, who was freakishly brilliant and indeed a scientist. He wrote technical manuals he called “Spaceships for Dummies” and classic SF, including Star Trek novels that hit the New York Times bestsellers lists.

So when he asked me to coauthor The Cauldron with him, I laughed. My science background is in geology and geography, with a dash of geographical spatial analysis thrown in the mix. I can tell you about all sorts of rocks and earth layers, and a little about earthquakes, volcanoes, rivers, and landscape features. Space?

He said it’d be easy.

It was an education in writing science fiction.

“Don’t delve too deeply,” Gene taught me. Keep the science light when you’re not an astrophysicist. Make the science do what you need it to, and never go into so much detail that your readers will discover what’s wrong, what’s impossible, and what’s baseless.

The ships in The Cauldron are amazing, and how they navigate the stars is something I can’t tell you…it could spoil the book. The bridge is someplace I could wrap around me…and nothing is technical. The controls do what they need to, and there is a mystical quality to everything.

The aliens are plausible and complex and interesting, and nothing about them is so detailed that it would be wrong. Just enough details to be right.

There’s real science in the book, too. I love to research, and so working on The Cauldron gave me a good fix of that.

There’s DARK MATTER. This is awesome stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter

There’s a world famous historical astronomer: http://www.space.com/19623-tycho-brahe-biography.html

There’s also an elephant, a circus, the Civil War, a Salem witch hunt, and a Wisconsin fishing resort transplanted in the middle of Indiana. Oh, there’s also a high school yearbook. And all of them have nothing and everything to do with science and fiction.

And if the world had been kinder, Mr. DeWeese and I would have written another science fiction novel. We’d already started to plot it.