Good handwavium vs. bad fake science

[mrissa]

I was talking to a friend about the TV show Eureka (which I really like, by the way, especially in the first part of S3), and I was saying that they mostly stayed on the side of "good handwavium" for me rather than "bad fake science." She, quite reasonably, asked how I drew that line. I think one of the main points for me is that if the science fictional element is not particularly plausible with what we currently know, vagueness about the technical details is a feature, not a bug. Writing books and classes on writing often teach us to be more specific in our writing so that it's more vivid, but sometimes you don't want it to be vivid, because you don't want the reader (or viewer) to have a vivid picture of why exactly this will not work and is in fact ridiculous to even contemplate.

There are, of course, things that cannot be vague enough to be anything but bad science. "The electromagnetic force doesn't work any more!" Well, if the electroweak force suddenly stopped working, we would all die more or less immediately. How do you think your neurons work? How do you think ionic bonds work, for heaven's sake? So you need to actually do the research and find out that building a Faraday cage is what you want rather than the destruction of the universe as we know it--simply saying, "I dunno, it just works that way," is not enough there.

Also, if you have something with problems, listing the problems in character conversation can sometimes get you through. "It took us years to figure out how to deal with the momentum problem," a scientist can say casually, shaking her head at the amount of effort required, or, "The toxicity of the byproduct nearly had us beat," and there you go, you have acknowledged that this is a problem, you have not had to become a Nobel-prize-winning scientist to write your story, on you go. (I mean, if you feel like becoming a Nobel-prize-winning scientist, that's totally fine, and don't let me stop you. I just feel that it shouldn't be a requirement.)

Anybody else have some ideas about writing good handwavium vs. bad fake science? Striking examples in either direction?

Comments

Re: Eureka

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

My book post at the time:

Neal Stephenson, Anathem. Do you like portmanteau words like the title? (anthem + anathema) If so, this is the book for you. If not...um. The thing is, I felt that Stephenson thought he was being clever significantly more often than I thought he was being clever. It was not to the point of a Jasper Fforde novel, where I wanted to shout, "Oh, shut up!" throughout the narrative. But I wanted to intone, "har de har, clever you," a great deal more often than I wanted to laugh, reading this. Also there is a terrible, terrible Dischism in the mid-800s...oh, such a bad Dischism, uff da. I went to see what the reviews of this were saying on Amazon, and nobody seemed to have gotten around to saying, "Not all that deep, actually." Many of the people who liked it were talking about how it would make you think, and if you didn't like thinking, you wouldn't like it. It turns out that was not my problem. My problem is that none of the thinking struck me as particularly "upsightful" on the topics at hand -- certainly nothing I hadn't seen done better elsewhere -- and after 900 pages, you want better than a couple of bits of not-too-badness. Also there were times when interesting worldbuilding was sacrificed to "trenchant" social commentary: yes, lots of people in the US today wear sports gear-inspired oversized clothing and drink lots of soda! How insightful to notice and draw parallels in this alternate world! That'll certainly teach those of us who think that...um...well, cadithial, maybe. He will read it and think, "Curse my Mountain Dew! This has made me think!"

...or else not. Disappointing. And all the more so because it was 900 pages, and he spent all the time it took him to write these 900 pages on this and not on something better. Not that this was horrible. (Wouldn't you like to see what I'd have said if it was horrible!) But for 900 pages from the author of the Baroque Cycle, I wanted more than not-horrible. Considerably more.

And then I made this post (http://mrissa.livejournal.com/573588.html) as well.

And that wasn't even about the characters. (What characters?...oh.)

Re: Eureka

[numinicious.livejournal.com]

I think I read both posts at the time, but I needed a good refresher, especially re: what this post is about.

So, looking back on the old post, it seems Stephenson handled the physics poorly, which was what I couldn't remember. I remembered quite well that I disliked his method of worldbuilding, which I recall as being unnecessarily pretentious and all "if you can't understand my effed up method of creating languages, you are too stupid to read my books". That turned me off. Again, I couldn't make it past the inflated introduction, much less get to the actual book.

According to you he also wasn't that good at the social commentary. But I was curious how he did the science-y part (since this post was about Science!!!!!), and you have answered my questions.

I'm gonna spend my money on... um. Other stuff. !Anathem.