The 2023 Locus Awards were announced on Sunday. Congratulations to John Scalzi for Best SF Novel (The Kaiju Preservation Society); R.F. Kuang for Best Fantasy Novel (Babel); T. Kingfisher for Best Horror Novel (What Moves the Dead); Charlie Jane Anders for Best YA Novel (Dreams Bigger than Heartbreak)—and congratulations to all the other winners.
NASA stepped in to halt lithium mining on a tabletop flat in Nevada, joining forces with indigenous tribal people and environmentalists. NASA uses the flat, untouched land as a calibration site for it satellite. Space carried the day on this one.
Tor.com provides an excerpt from Meriam Metoui’s YA horror mystery, A Guide to the Dark.
Also at Tor.com, a review of T.J. Klune’s latest, In the Lives of Puppets.
I can safely say I had never thought about the black hole at the center of our galaxy until I found this Ars Technica article.
On “The Big Idea” Robin C.M. Duncan postulates that scientific accuracy (or even, to some extent, plausibility) is less important to a good SF story than, well, the story. Do you agree? I think they make some interesting points.
This article has nothing to do with anything I discuss in this column. Well, except for alcohol. Iron Horse Winery and Vineyard is close to where I live, and my husband helped build it, so here, without further ado, is a cute article about how it because the “official sparkling wine of diplomacy” in the USA.
A world created by a single mother to entertain her two daughters on a remote Wyoming homestead in the 1920s has become a tradition honoring imagination, family and magic.
Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is not mentioned in the column, but PBS Newshour listed it as a recommended summer read, so I thought it could be our lead image.
Scientific accuracy and/or plausibility are only important to the extent that your audience considers them important. So it depends which of the six possible audiences you are writing your story for. And to some extent it depends on how scientifically literate that audience is. Most stories that call themselves “science fiction” are really “technology fantasy”. They use technology as the source of otherworldly wonder rather than magic, ghosts, mythological creatures, etc. The technology is presented as being the type of thing that scientists and engineers developed, even when it has no realistic basis in scientific knowledge or applications. Thus we still have undead tropes like FTL spaceships, teleportation, time travel, etc. For many readers it’s all perfectly fine, because they read other types of fantasy as well, and characters, setting, plot, and themes are more important to them than the details of how the given story’s source of wonder works.
The exception would probably be introducing inconsistencies or goofs in your own story’s background, scientific “facts” that are outright wrong, types of magic that obey different rules depending on what the plot requires, “powers” that spring up out nowhere as convenient to the protagonist, etc. Even writing for an audience like pulp magazine readers of the 1920s you might have been derided in letters to the editor for scientific howlers or badly behaved magical systems. The same type of criticism you might get for inconsistent characters, prose that trips over itself, contradictions in world-building, plot holes, etc., could come your way for bad science (or magic), but mostly because these indicate clumsy writing and carelessness.
I love the term “technology fantasy!” I think that’s perfect. Yes, the trick (and with fantasy too) is to keep your system as consistent as possible–or rationalize it really well when you don’t.