TIME TRAVEL

Sci-Fi Deak Style
by John Deakins

Fictional Time Travel is so universal that every SF writer feels obliged to write a Time Travel story. “Our heroine’s time machine leaves 2013 Chicago and emerges in . . .” 1913 Chicago, future Chicago, Jurassic Chicago, Native American Chicago; etc. What wonderful possibilities! Unfortunately, Time Travel carries the worst scientific flaws of any major SF idea.

We live in an Einsteinian universe. Newton’s laws also work pretty well. Time Travel requires a Ptolemaic, geocentric universe, of which this ain’t one.

If you travel in Time from a particular spatial location, you should emerge in that same location: Right? As the Earth rotates, Chicago is rolling eastward at 1600 km/hr. In the next second, your position will separate from your original by over 400 meters. Five minutes in Time is over 130 kilometers in space. The spinning Earth just won’t hold still!

Unless you repeal Conservation of Momentum, when you arrive with a twelve clock-hours difference than the time of day you left, you’ll exit onto an Earth in which everything on the rotational counter-side will be slamming into you at 3200 km/hr.

Just make sure that you travel exactly multiples of one day. Chicago will have rotated to the same spot . . . except that the Earth is revolving around the Sun at 30 km/sec more. Five minutes is almost 9000 km away. Even a quick jaunt leaves you breathing vacuum.

Don’t forget the Sun’s orbit around the Milky Way’s core (Add hundreds of km/hr more.) and the motion of the galaxy relative to the space-time continuum. Unless your time machine is also a sealed space craft, you won’t survive to appreciate just how much airless space the universe contains.

What about reentry? When you reach a new space-time locus, will you simply push the air aside as you expand from an infinitesimally small point? That would produce a whopper of a thunderclap. Arriving secretly would be impossible. If your machine were too flimsy, the rebounding shock wave would crush it.

Will you and the local molecules simply become one? Writers agree that arriving inside a solid, regardless of method, would be a poor survival idea. With untold trillions of molecules present, some of yours would arrive inside other molecules. You might blow up like a balloon, or simply blow up. If your atomic nuclei appeared in the same space as local atomic nuclei, and the strong nuclear force would fuse them, with fatal radiation and energy release. Nuclei that were close, but not close enough, would be repelled at particle-collider speeds. You’d create thousands of fast particles that would shred your cells like a radioactive shotgun blast.

We don’t want to give up Time Travel, but what can be done? You can always Ignore It. Your readers are also geocentric. They won’t notice that you can’t travel from now-Chicago to then-Chicago without cheating on the universe’s rules. Have fun.

That’s a solution? We’re Science fiction purists. There has to be a better way. More next time.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

Live With It

Sci-Fi Deak Style
by John Deakins

In the case of faster-than-light travel, we’re stuck with Ignore It or Unexplained Science. It’s possible to Live With It. If you can’t go faster than light, go slower than light. We can add Bussard Ram Jets or light sails, gradually accelerating to a useful fraction of light-speed. We won’t even try for trans-light speed, heading outward at a relative crawl. That’ll require decades or centuries of travel. That could work, but those solutions arrive with their own new problems.

We’ll need a “generation” ship even for the close stars. Youthful astronauts launch for Proxima Centauri; their grandchildren arrive to send back data. That involves maintaining a closed ecosystem for decades and shielding passengers and plants from a universe awash with cosmic rays. Otherwise, Generation 1 dies from lack of oxygen or fails to reproduce after being sterilized. Everybody dies of cancer, or the crew can’t control the ship because of accumulated brain damage. Social problems aboard would be huge.

A well-shielded craft would solve some problems, but its mass would reduce it to even slower crawl-speed, no matter what was pushing it. The crew would go from “generation” to generations. Could we maintain a viable social system and a closed ecosystem that long? I doubt it.

A round trip? You’re kidding, right? Slower-than-light flights are all one-way. Earth wouldn’t be your Earth anymore if you ever returned. The big problems rise from keeping a crew awake for an incredibly long time. So, put ‘em to sleep. We don’t have “cold sleep” or suspended animation for humans, but those are the kind of reasonable future developments that Science Fiction thrives on. Don’t wake up the crew, unless you can put them back to sleep. Machines don’t have to worry about century-long flights. Let a super-computer oversee all the sleepers. We could call him “Hal.”

Maybe you could wake the crew periodically. That leads to social complications. What if something goes wrong with the rotation? What if an active crew member goes bonkers?

You’ll need a ship that cosmic rays can’t reach the crew or the frozen passengers. A shaped asteroid would be the logical vessel. You’d have to postulate controlled fusion for energy, a perfectly recycling closed ecosystem, frozen sleep, and solutions to a myriad of social problems, but those are difficult. Trans-light speeds are impossible.

With so many scientific mountains to climb, why would we go there in the first place? Maybe we have to. Has the Earth become uninhabitable? Is the Sun about to explode? Have aliens driven us from our home? The writer can shine with new ideas there. Maybe we just want to go to the stars. Could interstellar travel become a religious quest? Could a star trip become the ultimate “high” for the enormously rich? Perhaps, for certain pre-disposed humans, the stars will become the ultimate Mt. Everest. Each new reason is the parent of another story.

Past writers have found a dozen exits bypassing the “No FTL” roadblock. Try out a few yourself.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

IGNORE IT

Sci-Fi Deak Style
by John Deakins

Nothing goes faster than light; no matter in our universe can reach light-speed. We can’t get around that fact. First, there’s presently no easy way to accelerate to anywhere close to light speed. To leave Earth requires roughly 11,000 m/s. Our fastest spacecraft might have reached 20,000 m/s. The speed of light is 300,000,000 m/s. We’re not even close (.7%). At conventional rocket velocities, the nearest star is over sixty thousand years away. No one is going to survive even the shortest interstellar trip using current technology.

We are Science Fiction! We have to go to the stars! For that, we need trans-light speeds. The first approach we must be Ignore It. An FTL ship takes off from Earth, and after plot-development (days; weeks) reaches Proxima Centauri. Or Hans Solo zooms the Millennium Falcon toward Cloud City. No one asks how his FTL drive works.

Many readers are completely unfamiliar with interstellar distances. They have a feeling that if you go fast enough, you’ll get there in a reasonable time. The trouble is that you can’t go fast enough. The closest star is over four years away at light speed. We don’t produce anything even close to light speed. We’d have trouble keeping interest in a voyage lasting even four years, and no one is projecting any planets orbiting Proxima Centauri. Every reasonable solar system is much farther. A thousand-year star voyage is almost beyond fiction. It rapidly drops off into silly science contrivance. Ignore It burns out its batteries trying to fix too many scientific contradictions. Nevertheless, Ignore It may be the only solution. Hopefully, our plotting will be so good that readership won’t notice when we travel at speeds that simply aren’t possible, never mind the rest of the impossibilities involved.

The second approach is Unexplained Science. No one has to explain how a “warp drive” works on Star Trek; they only have to name it. Some works hint at “wormholes” or “hyper space,” but the smart author will slide around the hard science. If you find a golden egg in your basket, don’t be dumb enough to ask how it arrived. If you postulate a ship with FTL drive, don’t be dumb enough to tinker with explanations. Unfortunately, that makes Unexplained Science just a subset of Ignore It.

How do we make this all work? Ignore It works well in Space Opera. (Have you ever wondered why ships that have anti-gravity and FTL drives still need fuel?) Let’s leave the “how” of FTL and impossible speeds entirely alone and concentrate on the action and the human interplay. Throw in a little Unexplained Science if you think the audience is getting restless.

Limit your FTL Unexplained Science to names only, hopefully a single pseudo-science title: maybe Space-time Folding or Worm-hole generator. Otherwise, you’ll end up looking like the Hollywood pimps are running you, too. (That would make you a . . . Never mind.)

There is another way out, but not this week.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

Are You a Science Fiction Writer?

by John Deakins

Never mind what you write: what do you read? Scientists and technologists who never write SF themselves, read it continually. They may not always recognize bad writing, but they’ll immediately spot a scientific or logical blunder. Science fiction has a better educated readership than that of bodice ripper romances. Listen as your SF-reading friends rip into some recently released SF film. Want more readers? Your current readers can make your book by word of mouth, but those readers can kill your book the same way. The Ignore It approach to scientific road-blocks may not be enough.

Live With It

Science is cold, hard, and unyielding, but it won’t let you down on consistency. If you’re stymied by missing FTL drives, write a story with slower-than-light interstellar transport. If it’s too dangerous to land on an alien planet, create a way to make contact without landing. If you can’t use your time machine for time travel, use it for space travel. Real science happens all the time. Most of what happens within our solar system follows fairly simple Newtonian physics, never mind Einstein. That’s a huge canvas on which to paint your word pictures.

You have before you enormous possibilities within Science. Mars doesn’t have multiply armed green Martians, but what it does have is fascinating, even if it is hard, cold, and unyielding.

Unexplained Science.

You don’t have to explain how your SF technology works; you only have to name it. In fact, the more you explain it, the sillier your explanations will sound to anyone who actually knows science. Some stories need controlled time travel, faster-than-light speed, and the ability to smooze with aliens, but the smart author will tiptoe around hard-science details of exactly how those things are accomplished.

The biggest danger of unexplained science lies inside the writer. We know our science. “Unexplained” makes us itch. It’ll be hard not to yield to the pressure to throw in “subspace” devices or “tachyon pulses.” Hollywood pimps are eager for more “drama” in their SF. They know no science, but they’re full of hackneyed “science fiction” ideas. (Well . . . they’re full of something.) Their “science” explanations stink up the genre; flawed logic flows from mainstream media as from a ruptured sewer line. How easily unexplained science crosses over into partially explained fantasy! On the west coast, that’s a mighty thin line. Nevertheless, it’s a line that we shouldn’t cross.

It’s time now to take on the behemoths of science fiction. We’ll beat them into submission, and then harness them to pull our stories. The blogs that follow are full of story “hooks.” If one snags you, go with it If you get that literary gestalt, when a story leaps full-blown into your mind, quit reading this and write that story. When you do, you’ve made this work a success.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

IMPOSSIBILITIES

by John Deakins

We’re going to take on some Science Fiction favorites: Time travel, Faster-Than-Light, alien planet landings. It’s not that those haven’t happened yet; they can’t happen. Think how bleak Science Fiction would be if those mechanisms were missing. We’ll beat them mercilessly, proving that they absolutely cannot work scientifically. Then, we’re going to rescue each concept. They’re too important to Science Fiction to let ugly Science kill them. We’ll nurture them before they depart down bright new pathways.

Erk! Touchy-feely exposition isn’t the answer here. Gritty, bottom-line repair work is There are three ways to get around a real-science roadblock. Here’s the first one - Ignore It.

Pretend the gorilla isn’t in the room. Throw an afghan over him, and call him an armchair. Stick to your plot’s logical development. Sweep your readers along so beautifully that they’ll suspend disbelief in that flawed area. Hollywood SF runs on the “Queen of Hearts Principle.” Viewers are expected to believe six impossible things before breakfast. Since Star Wars, some studios believe that with enough special effects no one will notice how scientifically ridiculous and logically impossible their plots are. The Core and 2012 are first-line examples. Anyone who knew science or logic ran from the theater screaming. Their science was ludicrous, their logic was M.I.A., but they had great special effects. Each also probably made enough money to pay for itself, which is all that Hollywood wanted anyway. Science fiction is expected to have higher standards.

Each of us is often expecting our readership to fork over more than a $10 “ticket.” Readers have no “Now Showing“ deadlines. They don’t have to either open your creation when the lights go down or close it when the credits roll. They have plenty of time to catch you with your scientific knickers around your knees. Each additional scientific impossibility means that suspension of disbelief has to jump a higher hurdle. Once a movie hits disk, the same rule applies. That audience has all the time they need to autopsy that film.

Can you get away with ignoring science anyway? Yes: You just have to be a terrific creative liar. Remember those first three seasons of Star Trek? Seasons two and three were written by Hollywood hacks. They almost got away with swiss-cheese science (more holes than curds) and lousy logic, because the series was ground-breaking in so many other ways. Trekkies are still a force, but some of those later episodes were pure twaddle.

Perhaps you’ll get lucky. Perhaps many of your audience will be unaware of the particular science that you’re violating. You and they can skip along together, blissfully pretending. Some will always be carried along by the spectacle, whether written or cinematic. I wouldn’t count on that, though. Remember how Star Trek’s five-year mission fizzled out after three years? Even for SF fans, bad writing and spotty logic begin to smell funny after a while.

There has to be a better way, and we need to find it.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

SCI-FI DEAK STYLE

Science That Doesn’t Work In Science Fiction. . . But Has To

by John Deakins

The first word in “Science Fiction” is “Science.” “SF” includes Speculative Fantasy, but Science Fiction is supposed to remain pristine. The Science has to work. Readers expect the paranormal in fantasy, but Science Fiction must stick to the rules of the universe. Certainly, every hard SF story springs from some scientific aspects that have fictionally altered. When we adventure in the Asteroid Belt, both writer and reader are aware no humans have yet reached the Asteroid Belt. That’s why they call it fiction. We’re all in on the inside joke: We all know we’re lying. The object is to make the lies entertaining.

Once we’re committed to the Asteroid Belt, however, writing rules change. The remaining science must be correct; the logic must be consistent. Our flights among the orbiting rocks must obey the Newton’s laws. Our spacecraft can’t be towed by a dragon flapping its wings. A wizard can’t wave his wand and transport us instantly to the next rock. An Elf isn’t going to lead us down tunnels inside magically orbiting mountains. We’re obliged to stick to scientific facts. Our fiction is like an exotic SF game, but we’re only allowed playing pieces that actually function in this universe. We must follow if>>>then logic: If certain current scientific knowledge has been altered, then a story follows thus…

Some of the greatest fun of SF writing is the amount of mayhem we can create from behind our keyboard. We can destroy the world with an asteroid impact, nuclear war, or plague. We can suffocate our astronauts in unforgiving vacuum. We can kill space colonists with unnamed pestilence or human-devouring monsters. We can deliver supernovas, rampaging aliens, and fatal time paradoxes. We can alter history or bring humans to extinction. It’d be a shame to see our reign of terror end just because we’re shackled by science’s rock-hard rules.

The trouble is that scientific laws are hard, cold and unyielding. There is nothing sadder than a beautiful theory killed by an ugly fact. For the Science Fiction writer, that sadness occurs when a beautiful story idea is gored by an ugly scientific principle. For example, Burroughs’ Mars and Venus just aren’t there. We’d like to ride a thoat across the lichen-covered plains or explore the steaming Venusian swamps, but we simply can’t do that in Science Fiction. Alas, the Mars of red princesses is fantasy only.

Science is supposed to be the mainstay of Science Fiction. What happens when Science gets in the way of Science Fiction? Sometimes the story-telling urge is so powerful that it makes us willing to slide around our own dogma. To get that story written, we are (shudder!) willing to commit adultery on science. The result is often an offspring that really needed an abortion.

What are we going to do, then? (Funny you should ask that, since that’s what this blog’s about.) Over the next weeks, we will push Science Fiction into several deep science pits and try to rescue it. Stick around.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.