Errors Science Fiction Writers Make

First off, I’m as guilty as anybody. In my latest novel, I had an old woman with a Vegan accent when nobody had been to that stellar system. I was thinking “Vestan” and somehow wrote “Vegan”. In my next novel, about a third finished, there’s a domed city on Mars named Vega. It gets hit by a meteoroid. That’ll show it!
Science fiction may be the hardest form of fiction to write. The books say “write what you know,” but science encompasses a whole lot. An astrophysicist won’t know any more about archaeology than anyone else without a degree in archaeology.
I’m not a scientist; I was an art student who had always loved science and science fiction, and was corrupted by computers when I was twelve, and at thirty I owned one. But I worked with scientists for the state of Illinois; my computer knowledge got me the job in the middle of the 1980s Bush recession. The scientists were psychologists, sociologists, and statisticians.
In Journey to Madness I added a narcissist for a little extra drama. But unfortunately, having worked with psychologists is no substitute for a psychology degree. I couldn’t do it without Google and Wikipedia and my psychology-majored daughter.
The error made over and over in the last century, probably more than any other, is being way to optimistic about the future, although in this century everybody seems to think that it will be a stinking, authoritarian dystopia. Probably because that’s what the world is now. Or at least in the US, but the Canadian SF is as bad and the British even worse.
But twentieth century writers who didn’t specialize in science fiction seldom made this error because they seldom if ever talked of science or new technologies, like Vachel Lindsay in his The Golden Book of Springfield, written from 1904 to 1919 about the Illinois 2019 bicentennial, where the only things invented in a century were street sweepers and “a new type of movie projector” and no new scientific discoveries were found. That book was more fantasy than speculative fiction.
Twentieth century writers, even the best, were as overoptimistic as today’s are overpessimestic. Isaac Asimov had an antique self-driving car in 2020 in the short story Sally. They’re still trying to make them work, but then, we never invented the positronic brain.
Arthur C. Clark’s 2001: A Space Odyssey had picture phones in 2001. Not Skype or Zoom, but integrated into telephone service like they’ve been talking about since the invention of the television. Everyone expected them.
I always try to avoid this by never mentioning dates, but I did at least once with Red Barchetta. I didn’t actually spell the date out, but you can work it out with a little bit of simple math. Mars, Ho! Is “a few hundred years in the future,” far enough that it won’t matter. Nobots is ten million years in the future, so it’s certainly far enough that it won’t matter.
I wonder what it was about 2019-20 that fascinated twentieth century SF writers so much? Blade Runner was set in 2019, although the book it was taken from, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? doesn’t mention the date, just that life on Earth is on its last legs.
I started out by mentioning how hard it is to get the science right, but movie makers don’t even try. One thing fiction literature seldom gets wrong but movies invariably do, not just science fiction movies, is ignoring real science. This may be because a lot of science fiction writers were scientists, but no scriptwriter I know of was.
Often the book will do an excellent job, but the movie, although a well done, enjoyable movie, even an award winning film, seldom gets the science right. Of course, the worst offenders at ignoring the laws of physics aren’t SF, but action flicks. You are NOT going to walk after being shot in the leg! You will lay there waiting for an ambulance no matter what, and might bleed to death waiting.
Then there are unforseen and unforseeable new technologies, and the obsolescence of familiar technologies, sometimes new scientific discoveries that upend everything. In Kurt Vonnegut’s short story 2BR02B, not only is there mass starvation from overpopulation by the year 2000, not forseeing the advances in biochemistry and mechanical technologies, but a phone booth and a six digit phone number as well.
The book The Martian by Andy Wier got only one thing wrong, and that one thing was something that science didn’t know when he wrote the book. Alas, there is absolutely no way to avoid this mistake, except to do what Terry Pratchett did: stop writing science fiction. His fantasy is far better than his science fiction, anyway.
Now, the movie made from Wier’s book did have an error that showed up in the theater, but not in the DVD. Whatney opens the outside airlock door and the siren blares, he steps inside, and it keeps blaring until the inside door opens.
But Mars has almost no air, so when the alarm sounded it would be a very low pitch, and barely audible, getting higher pitched and louder as the atmosphere increased inside the airlock, since high pitched sounds don’t travel well in a thin medium.
Since only audiobooks make sound, the book lacked this error.
I posit that the Star Wars movies aren’t science fiction at all. There’s no science! A parsec is a unit of distance, not time... at least in this universe. And as a parsec is the distance at which one astronomical unit subtends an angle of one arcsecond, and an astronomical unit (AU) is the distance between the Earth and the Sun, how is that measurement found in a completely different galaxy? There is all sorts of magic, like anti gravity, artificial gravity, “mitochlorians”, but no science explaining any of it.
If you can’t come up with an at least plausible explanation, like Asimov’s “positronics” or everybody’s “subspace” to explain your magic, it’s not science fiction, it’s just fantasy.