do you try to argue facts when reading science fiction/fantasy?

It depends

One the one hand, yes I like things to be logical, plausible ( even if they are talking robots)

On the other, a good writer makes it plausible in his prose. A good writer can make you believe in the world he has created ( often because while the logic might not work in this world, the internal logic of the created world is sound)


So it's not necessarily what you're writing about but how you portray it. And some readers always want everything explained. If more than one reader mentions the same thing though, you might want to slide in just a little explanation.

One of my favourite Books is David Grinnell's Edge Of Time . A group of scientists create a miniature universe and keep it in a shed .The mini universe is evolving faster than our own ,allowing the scientists to visit it, in different periods of it's history.A totally unbelievable idea, but a good and enjoyable book . I think, you need to make ideas a backdrop to the story with believable characters.It never really works if you try to write it the other way round.

Personally, I think this is why sci-fi is no longer distinguished between fantasy. In fantasy, anything can happen and nothing really needs to make sense or be plausible (magic did it). In sci-fi it was originally supposed to be based on actual science. Now days, most sci-fi is basically fantasy, thus why I think the two genres are combined.

I think as long as you don't try to pass off what you're story suggests as real science people should probably be a lot more tolerant. Its just that if you have a scientist talking about dust mites the size of sub-atomic particles, then you might get some red flags from folks, unless you make this guy a 'mad-scientist' who works in with almost conspiratorial concepts.

Anyway, I agree with IdiotsRUs, its all how you purpose it.

brnitschke said:

Personally, I think this is why sci-fi is no longer distinguished between fantasy. In fantasy, anything can happen and nothing really needs to make sense or be plausible (magic did it). In sci-fi it was originally supposed to be based on actual science. Now days, most sci-fi is basically fantasy, thus why I think the two genres are combined.

Anyway, I agree with IdiotsRUs, its all how you purpose it.

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Wrong. What's at issue is the kind of sense it makes, not whether it makes sense or not at all. In fantasy, what happens doesn't have to make sense in the real world, but there's at least a large minority of fantasy that tries to make sense in the context of the story.


And hard sci-fi was never the be-all/end-all of science fiction. Old Space Opera, science fantasy, chemical rocket imperialism...

You can't paint either genre with such a broad brush. SF/F are in the same section because there is a significant overlap in readership, which means that in marketing terms, a bookstore is more likely to sell these books when the readership can find them in a convenient and known place.


As to the original question, I cop to being someone who comments on the science (or world-building) as well as the story. I try not to lwet my biases in terms of trope/convention preferences get in the way when I do so, but it's hard to ignore your own opinion.

The people who object to a robot with a personality don't accept the idea that we can generate artificial intelligence that closely simulates humanity, for instance.

Another thing to consider is this, it's a lot easier to suspend disbelief for the major sf premises/concepts of a story, than it is for each little detail. As we experience the real world, we generate a model of it starting with the big categories and moving to the small ones. This model informs what we see as "normal".

It's the same witha story: The reader is actively generating a model of the story world based on what you as the author puts on the page. The first iteration of this model? "SFF story, gonna be some wierd shit here." Each time they encounter a significant chunk of new information, the reader is going to have to adjust their model.

If there are significant objections to certain things that occur in the story, it's the result of one or both of these problems:

1. You have presented something as either externally or internally consistent... and it isn't.
2. You just presented something wrong, and if you had written it in another way, the reader would not have a problem.
3. Okay, I lied. The other possibility is that this reader is bringing some sort of personal issue to the table, eg, you gave them a bad critique, they are scientifically inclined to the point of obsession over minor details, they only like hard SF, etc. In this case, you just need to ignore them, they are not your target audience, and constitute only a small minority of readers anyway.

But just because you have made a more outrageous claim already and had it accepted, that does not mean that you can now do whatever you want. The idea that once disbelief is suspended, you can stop worrying about it is a major myth of writing. SoD is continuously being revised as the reader moves through the story. Most people who do this aren't necessarily evaluating you on real-world science, but on internal consistency in the story.

In fantasy, anything can happen and nothing really needs to make sense or be plausible (magic did it).

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If the author can't be bothered to make it plausible within the context of his world ( even if it IS magic) I can't be bothered to read them

Actually most published fantasy does make it plausible, or least attempt to - even if it's 'Well, I used magic to make the talking robot. Shame I had to cut off poor old Ted's head to do it,, but hey there's always a price to pay, right?' because any half-decent magic system has rules and limits, even if they aren't spelled out ( U C wut I did thar?) they are consistent with those magic laws and therefore your internal logic is maintained.

Of course there's always a few that don't. BUt I don't find them worth reading much

One specific observation for this thread is that Marvin from Hitchhiker's Guide is a CARICATURE of a talking robot. The situation is of a robot being so self-absorbed and depressed that it's actually funny. Humor seems to be a totally different animal when it comes to suspension of disbelief. The whole story is full of caricatures and intentionally-illogical arguments (such as the Babelfish being a round-about proof for the existence of God), and that's the level on which it works. There are surely more appropriate stories to use as examples for this thread.

I'll suspend my disbelief and embrace fantasy/impossible elements if they're internally consistent, follow their own logic, and it serves a purpose in the story. I like character-driven "soft" sci-fi. I'd enjoy the idea of an android with emotions, for example. Realistic? Not really. But it's an interesting concept to explore the human condition and an interesting "What if...?" Keep the android consistent and "real" in its own context, and I'll keep reading.

I will not suspend my disbelief and tend to get irritated when authors can't be bothered to get the mundane, everyday details right. Two dimensional stereotyped characters who were never close to real people to begin with, for example. And if an author puts horses/trains/what have you in their books, I expect a modicum of research or it smacks of lazy writing.

defyalllogic said:

bomb shelter logic, math about water and food consumption (yes i can explain why the utilities still work, it just isn't relevant)...

and there is another world entirely where people are watching what happened on earth through signals collected from these bugs... but the fact that she takes showers is illogical?

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These I might quibble about, depending on what the setup was. If the POV character is the type of person who wouldn't notice or wonder, and that character trait is consistent, then ok, I'll buy that the explanation's just off-page. But most people I think would wonder why showers still work in the middle of an apocalypse -- isn't interruption of basic services a pretty standard thing to expect in those circumstances? (If that is your scenario, that is; I'm not 100% clear on this.) I'd be fine with a POV character wondering and not having an answer. But if nobody seems to notice, and that's not consistent with their thoughts/actions on other issues, then I'll be bothered.



Another example -- my brother was brainstorming a necromancer story that would be, essentially, a medieval zombie apocalypse, with zombie knights in armor. Fine. But no horses for the knights. Ok, why? I got stuck on that point, until he worked it out (via character logic & worldbuilding). I'm fine with an answer that says "magic did it", if that fits the rest of the world and the characters. Otherwise, yes, I'm going to nitpick, even if the major premise doesn't bother me.

IdiotsRUs said:

If the author can't be bothered to make it plausible within the context of his world ( even if it IS magic) I can't be bothered to read them

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Ditto. Fictional worlds need to be internally consistent. They can have rules different from the real world, but they must follow their own rules in a logical and plausible way.

I'll also add that if an author can't make their novel's physical world have verisimilitude, their culture building and character psychology are also likely to be trash because creating these requires the same sensitivity to what is logical and plausible in context.

Half the point of reading science fiction or fantasy is because readers like seeing a picture painted of a world that works differently from their own. (This is called milieu, and applies to historical, fantasy, and horror settings too.) Sometimes a sentence or two of explanation is enough. Sometimes it's just a matter of presenting information in the best order to preserve readers' suspension of disbelief and gradually feed their curiosity to know more about the world.

that has nothing to do with the fact that she's thinking about taking a shower. it just is. she doesn't feel grateful of blessed. just smelly.

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So your character might think' Thank god for those solar panels or I'd be stinking worse than week old doggy dos'

As Sun says, sometimes just one line can make the difference.

It's possible to write a fantasy story in which strange, inexplicable things happen for no apparent reason beyond their symbolic or thematic value. This is a potential strength of the genre. However, IMO, you have to establish this early on as a stylistic choice, and you must be careful that you don't abuse it in ways that cheat the reader. Prefer honesty where possible.

explanations vs implications

I think you need two things to create that suspension of disbelief...

Consistency :
You can't change the rules in the middle. Tell me a device doesn't work when its foggy, fine, I accept it. I don't even need much of a reason. I will throw the book against the wall if you try to hand wave something about why the thing works in fog now, when the hero's in trouble.

Thought out implications :
Writers sometimes forget that often what is most interesting isn't the device at all, its what having that device does to the culture and people around it. Suppose someone invents a time machine. Ok, pretty standard so far. How does it affect our society? Suppose you couldn't actually change any events in time. You could imagine people who use the time machine for research, anthropologists, historians etc. Maybe people take tours, See Jesus give the sermon on the mount.

Still pretty standard? Think about what this does to say legal proceedings. Want to know what really happened on march fifth? A judge can hop in a time machine and be an eye witness. Why do you even need juries anymore? What if a subculture develops around the thing. Kids hop into it and hide out in ancient Italy. Maybe criminals use the time travel device to setup a nice little base of operations in the middle of medieval Europe. Go to the future, steal, travel back in time when you need to hide out. Any of these ideas are more interesting then a drawn out explanation about how the device works.

Alfred Bester didn't explain much about why we suddenly have a ton of telepaths in The Demolished Man, but the society was so interesting, you never question it.

I think this is a place where some people can go overboard with the infodump, justifying whatever backstory/ innovations, etc., they've used, and others may go too far in the other direction, and not mention the reasons for anything. Possibly they have a reason or explanation or justification, and possibly they don't. I guess the key is to find the "happy medium"--throw in a bare minimum of explanation, to help it be believable to the reader, and make sense within the context. If you go back in later and realize you have too much, you can always delete some.

To give an example where I realized my "semi-primitive" villagers wouldn't necessarily have had the tools to carve out a big rock bathing pool, I created a scenario where some Journeying magic-workers of the northern mountain tribes had visited this village at some point in the past, and thanked the village for their hospitality by using their northern-tribe rock-shaping magic to create this bathing pool. I'm not quite sure if the villagers have a system of cauldrons and pipes to heat it, or if the village mages just go in and regularly renew the Warming spells, but hopefully the brief mention of this, thrown in when my character is bathing, will help the reader understand not only the technological/ magical level of the village, but also the level of other villages/ tribes . . . sorry if that example is more fantasy than SF, but I hope it's at least a little helpful, anyway

defyalllogic said:

so with all this consistency, do you want to read about it?

i totally agree that "because" just won't cut it in explaining how things work in a novel, but i don't want to be reading about a captain and his crew and there's this explanation of how the ship stays in the sky and goes into light speed and so on. just hit the light speed button and i'll believe it...

where does that information go? I know why they water is still available (they're on a resource grid that is kind of a buy in program. you get your filters and panels installed and everyone shared the harvested solar, wind, water, etc. it's all self contained and no one gets billed or had to flip switches or anything.) but that has nothing to do with the fact that she's thinking about taking a shower. it just is. she doesn't feel grateful of blessed. just smelly. ( she's not wicked deep and reflective) she know why the water is on, same way i know how toilets work. technically i don't know anything about toilets, septic systems or sewers, but i get it...

does that make sense? (it actually comes up in another chapter and she tried to explain it...)

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When I was at Philmont, they had solar-powered showers at one of the stops. It was pooring when we got there, and several people got in trouble for taking showers before checking in, because they were supposed to be closed, or the camp would run out of water.


If you don't have pipes or wires because of the apocalypse, it's not just about using a filter or solar panels. Depending on the size of your water heater, you may have limited how water. There's also how much battery capacity you have, and whether you've had enough sun lately. All of these issues are things that might be on your character's mind when she takes a post-apocalyptic shower.

People know what you need for a shower now, but they don't know what you need to take a shower after armageddon. There's also the fact that not a great number of post-apocalyptic yarns allow for a shower every night. It's your job as the author to balance thir need for knowledge and the known conventions of your genre with not too much info-dumping.

This thread got me thinking. Not once have I ever depicted a character bathing.

To be briefly serious...

Yeah, everything that's been said. Your world needs to be internally consistent (for fantasy and scifi both) or people will call bullshit. Don't bother with long explanations, because the people who don't care will be bored and the people who do care will say you did it wrong. And when that fails, make something so exciting happen, that the reader doesn't have the time to wonder why your character managed to find a five-star hotel in the middle of the Mojave desert. It's all sleight of hand.

Also... why can't your character just take a bath? Showers are technologically more challenging than a tub'o'water. If it's post-apoc and there's a limited water supply, why not a tin cup of water and a rag?

Most importantly, a simple basin of water with even one person regularly bathing in it will become filthy beyond usefulness in short order unless it's at least a good-sized pond. Running water (or chemicals premodern societies don't have access to) is necessary for that to work otherwise. And if there's running water, then the supply ain't exactly limited, now is it?

defyalllogic said:

for instance?

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Isaac Asimov's robot stories are a good starting point. The robot characters are sympathetic and diverse... but little things about them tell you they're robots. You couldn't replace those characters with humans and have the same character.

Marvin could be a depressed human. He's only a robot so we can laugh at the way robots are shown in fiction (and laugh at false advertising, in the case of "your plastic pal who's fun to be with"). Which is great for comedy, but works less well in serious stories.

I agree consistency is key.

Realism is just as important though, depending on the nature of your story. For example, if you write historical fiction/alternate history(even fantasy), you better have a good understanding of the way people had to live in a given point in time. A good example I brought up in a topic a while back, your main characters, outside of a "plot device" shouldn't be covering more than 20 or maybe 30 miles per day on foot through rough terrain (even that number is higher than you'd see in real life). This is especially true when they're wearing mail, and they're carrying 50 lbs of supplies. It's just not going to happen. It's not something you need to dwell on, but it's something to take into consideration when you're laying out your "fantasy/even real" world.

Doing your homework is always important. The more homework you do, the easier it will be to avoid plot holes, and to create the internal consistency needed to suspend disbelief.