So you’re writing hard science fiction. You’ve spent a week researching the thermal control systems on space stations for a scene where you need a time-dependent problem for the heroes to fix.
The problem is, you’ve got like an 80-page dissertation on exactly what goes wrong and how to fix it and how to fail at fixing it twice for that try-try-succeed satisfaction… and it reads like stereo instructions. You’ve read old hard sf that had indigestible paragraphs of now-outdated science explanations and you have a sinking suspicion your readers aren’t going to be interested in your 27 color glossy photos with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was.
What do you throw out? How much science explanation is too much?
When I’m editing down, I’ll find a chunk o’ cool facts, and though I like them all, and I think they are all useful, I ask myself which of these facts are necessary to the story?
For my story “Hearts” I had all these details for how the alien biologies worked, what was happening when I said they ‘talked’… and in the end I cut all of it, because the alien was the POV character and would never think about how their lungs work, and if the reader is thinking about permeable tissues and cell transportation, the reader is not engaging with the characters as characters.
In “A Place to Stand On” I had to add more of my research back in, after first readers asked questions about why they didn’t have pressure suits on or what the gravity was like.
So, okay, there are some rules for including science explanations:
Don’t include things that take the reader away from the story.
Do include things if they stop the reader from getting away from the story.
If you keep the reader engaged, is there really such a thing as too much science? Creative nonfiction books sell like hotcakes. I read Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars and couldn’t put it down though 18 pages on how space toilets work.
How much science explanation is too much? Exactly the amount that bores the reader.
Consider these examples:
The Reiner Gamma anomaly is a patch of high-albedo surface on the moon about 70km in diameter. Observers from the Earth suspected it was a highland but this was eliminated as a possibility because the feature casts no shadow. It is shaped like a tadpole or an extended swirl of white against darker terrain. It is associated, like all such anomalies, with Lunar Magnetic Anomalies (LMA) however not all LMAs have an associated albedo anomaly so science is not yet sure what causes it and maintains it.
That’s me doing my quickest summarizing of facts from a wikipedia article. Shove that chunk into a story and everyone not fascinated by magnetic anomalies will choke. Now let’s convey the same information in a way that’s more story-like:
A complex swirl of milky color cut across the darker grey regolith, like a giant had spilled whitewash on the lunar plain. “It’s not…” My eyes followed the wriggling lines to the horizon. I turned to my guide. “It can’t be a different material, there’s no change in altitude or…”
“Exactly. Astronomers thought it was a highland and got chills when they realized it had no shadow! There’s a magnetic anomaly inside it. There are other, less cool-looking bright spots that have similar magnetic weirdness.”
“Nothing keeps your whites brighter than Lunar Magnetic Anomalies!”
He laughed. “Yeah, but there’s places with LMAs that don’t have bright spots, too. So it’s probably even weirder than it looks.”
Really rough – I wrote that in about ten minutes – but I hope it shows how the problem with the first paragraph wasn’t the information conveyed, but how it was done. I included all the important information in the first paragraph: the anomaly is big, it is squiggly, it is on the moon, it has an associated magnetic anomaly, there are others, and there are magnetic anomalies that don’t have albedo anomalies. (I left out the 70km. As a reader I always skip numbers, so cut that noise. It’s better to give ‘gut feel’ estimates than numbers for size. So I put in that it went to the horizon.)
With enough time and refining of your draft, you should be able to include all the science without boring your reader!
(I also have a post on How Much Science is Enough.)
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