Tech

In my afterword to First, I made a comment about how I’m not a scientist and any failings in the science of the book are my fault. Which is true on both counts. Some of the online comments about the book make note of how the electromagnetic drive (EMD) in the story stretches belief, which I find funny. The hyperspace drive in Star Wars is believable? Warp drive in Star Trek makes sense? I could go on with a list of other SF examples, but those two are fantastic yet seem to be accepted as plausible. Sure, scientists have written papers on how warp drive might be possible. Well, I got my idea for the EMD from a science article. Not being defensive here, I just think it’s amusing how some things are perceived as believable and others, not so much. When I wrote First, I wanted the space travel to be almost instantaneous. Why? Because I wanted the story to focus on the characters without them having to endure weeks, months, or years, of interstellar travel. Depending on the book you want to write, those stretches of time can be a momentum-killer. If your book is about people forced to live together in the enclosed, extremely limited world of a spaceship and how the characters cope with the boredom of space travel, then yes, put that in your book. That’s not what I was going for, so I took the spark of an idea from an article (linked on the First page on this site) and said yes, let’s use this idea to propel the story. I’m not arguing with the people who make online comments about the believability since, as I said, I’m not a scientist. I don’t expect people to comb my website for a link on how the tech could be feasible, I just want them to remember that the second word in SF is fiction. If an author can’t dream up crazy ideas and has to conform to our current understanding of the universe, then it just becomes S without the F.