Author's Notes on: Science vs. Fiction
...and to some extent, fantasy.
I’ll be the first to admit I write some weird settings.
I already touched on this back in October 2021 (see: my article Author’s Notes on; Strange Settings), but it was something of a footnote at the end of an article that was much more concerned about introducing readers to off the wall settings and keeping your reader’s suspension of disbelief.
So, for the first free article after Mythic’s run, I thought I’d return to this topic in more detail!
DISCLAIMERBefore I go any further, I do want to clarify that, like always, this advice is not universal. This is an insight into how I write sci-fantasy and won't apply to everyone.
Also, this article, like its sister article from October, will contain spoiler-free references to The Cardinal Directive.
You’ll run into differing opinions about how science fiction should be written. If you’re the type of person that intends to become an expert on particle physics so you can write your book, more power to you! But this article is going to be exceptionally unhelpful for that.
In general terms, writing science fiction involves you as the creator making a decision on where science meets fiction. You have full rein to decide how much of your story is science and how much is fiction. I personally lean more towards the fiction side of science fiction. I use science to enhance fiction, but I don’t stick religiously to it.
For example, The Cardinal Directive, as many of you may know, takes place on Mars. It’s somewhat colonized, but not fully terraformed — people live in domes on the planet’s surface that mimic Earth’s atmospheric conditions, and only specialized groups of people are equipped to travel between these domes to deliver supplies.
I knew going into the project that I wanted there to be enough science for it to be believable, so I started researching. I watched documentaries and read all about Mars’ geography, and, to my surprise, there exists a full topographic map of Mars, created by the US Geological Survey in 2003 for NASA.
It’s incredibly detailed — and labeled — and was the first resource I saved when starting development on the series.
I learned that Mars is currently broken up into quadrangles. Each quadrangle has both a number and a name, as well as a list of notable features. From all this, I was able to determine where exactly I wanted to start my story: a quadrangle known as Phoenicis Lacus.
Here’s why:
Phoenicis Lacus translates to Lake of the Phoenix. A phoenix metaphor felt interestingly apt for a zombie story.
Two of the volcanoes in the area are speculated to have once had glaciers or possibly still have hidden glaciers. I wanted to pick a location that would believably have water, that way I could have larger civilizations closer to the source of water and smaller ones further away from it.
The Noctis Labyrinthus, translated to Labyrinth of the Night, extends into this quadrant. The Labyrinth is made up of densely interconnected canyons, fills with fog on a seasonal basis, and connects to the Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in the entire solar system. The totality of the canyon system, if it were on Earth, would stretch coast to coast across the United States.
Volcanic activity. To be clear, there is no current volcanic activity on Mars, at least that we’ve seen. However, the Tharsis area was once incredibly active, which leads to an abundance of two things: mafic minerals, and lava tubes. As I knew I wanted the original colony ships to have been sent as part of a mining operation, an iron and magnesium-rich area felt like a perfect place to find civilization even after the initial operation ceased.
Mars is incredibly cold, especially at the poles. The areas near the equator, however, can get to be about 70 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer. This made them an ideal place to settle because at least part of the year isn’t spent below freezing.
I had been intending to just create a believably Martian-like area and never be incredibly specific about where we were on the planet. Instead, science and research gave me a plethora of places to choose from and hooks to use to build this setting and flesh it out.
Suddenly I had access to a creepy-cool Labyrinth, natural underground tunnels, a way to plausibly set up where cities might be, and so much more. It informed me a lot about the story, and I continue to draw inspiration from this knowledge on both a geographical and superstitious level.
But, notably, I don’t stick rigorously to this knowledge either. I use it to give a basis for reality, but I also leave myself free to design other parts of the world at my leisure.
The Labyrinth in my Mars fills pretty much every morning with fog — fog that, in my Mars, spills out of it and onto the surrounding plateau. Is this entirely true? Not really, but it does have a basis in fact, and on top of that is just an incredibly interesting visual.
One of the towns in the area is called Piket Rock and is named after a large free-standing pillar of rock near town. Is there a place like that in the Phoenicis Lacus quadrangle? Probably not! Does it matter? No! Because I want there to be a free-standing pillar of rock there!
There’s a repeater station at the top of a hill about half a day’s travel away from the Labyrinth. Radio towers get the best signal if they’re placed higher up, so the signal doesn’t get cut off by mountains or large rocks, etc. Is there actually any kind of elevation there in real life? No idea. Pretty sure there isn’t. But there is in my Mars because I wanted it that way, and it’s made up for in part by the fact that it makes sense to put a radio tower at the top of a hill. This logic lends enough credibility to the repeater station being there that your brain generally doesn’t question whether or not the actual landmass should be there.
I use science to help flesh out the world and give me hooks for my story, but I don’t confine myself to it. There are some things that if they don’t make sense scientifically I’ll look for a way to make them work, but I also just leave the option open to take the reins and drive the story in a way that’s narratively interesting even if it isn’t 100% scientifically accurate.
Just like writing straight science fiction, sci-fantasy adds the further question of where your science meets your fantasy. It’s up to you to decide how much you want to mix the concepts.
A party of adventurers sent by a wizard to kill a giant biomechanical Kraken that lurks deep in the ocean? A world with magic, but also robots? You could write that.
A cop using their cybernetic eye to detect traces of unicorn blood as they pursue reports of cultists holed up in the abandoned supermart in the bad part of town? Sure! You can write that!
A hospital where nanotech healing and clerics with healing spells coexist? Sure! There are some really interesting interactions to be explored there. You can absolutely write that.
There’s really no limit. You can mix and match, coexist, blend, and do anything you want.
The world Cardinal is set in is an alternate timeline to our own, so I decided to think of my world as having a science fiction core, with fantasy elements on top of that. This meant that while having obviously fantastical things in the story, like dragons and hovercores, they would be grounded to some extent within the world’s science.
Dragons are a staple of fantasy, so how was I going to ground them in science?
Step One: Isolate what you want. I wanted dragons. The image has been kicking around in my head for several years of dragon sled dog teams and that’s the vision I wanted to see.
Step Two: Consider anything already existing in the setting. Don’t try to make anything stretch too far, but poke around and see if anything that is already established in your world can be related to what you want. Cardinal takes place in the same universe as all my books, which have contained genetic manipulation as a through-line for several years now.
Step Three: Start making connections. I essentially had the base and top of a pyramid — now I just needed the middle bits. This part can be as extensive or simple as you like. I decided that ARNEN, the spearhead of genetic manipulation in this setting, had a large role in Mars’s foundation and as part of that, bioengineered the dragons so that long-distance travel between disparate civilizations on Mars was possible.
Step Four: Elaborate. Take time to look over your answer to step three. Let your imagination run and ask questions about how this would work in the setting. I asked myself questions like “If dragons are bioengineered, did they do it from scratch?” and decided that no, they would have used DNA from many of Earth’s creatures.
Step Five: Check what you’ve come up with against what you originally wanted. Did you achieve it? Is it a bit different from what you pictured? If so, in a good way? Or does it miss the mark of what you wanted? I ended up with a good setup for multiple types of dragons that took inspiration from different types of animals on Earth. They’re recognizably dragons, but also have a lot of room to play around with the specifics of what they look like and how they act. I was fairly happy with how it turned out. If you aren’t, return to step three and rethink your connections, or else start from step one and rephrase what part is most important to you that you reach by the end.
Past that, continuing to build on the connections you’ve made is a great way to flesh out the concept. I asked further questions like “what kinds of dragons would have what kinds of genes?” and “if dragons are bioengineered, do they still have instincts?”
This process helped a ton for world-building. I admit I don’t know if it would work scientifically, combining different genes like that. My understanding of neurogenesis and genetic manipulation isn’t as vast as it could be, but with what I do remember and a bit of story magic, it’s 100% a thing, and the more realistically they’re integrated into the setting, the easier it is to make the fantastical concept feel at home in a science fiction story.
Hovercores went through a similar process.
Step One: I wanted dragon dogsled teams. I had the dragons, now I just needed the sled. Regular sleds seemed like they’d have a hard time on the Martian terrain, and using wheels just didn’t feel right. I wanted hovercraft.
Step Two: I didn’t have much to work with already set up. There wasn’t any obvious precursor to hover technology. However, I did know that Mars was a mining colony.
Step Three: Mars was covered in mining colonies, so I delved into researching the kinds of minerals that are in abundance on Mars. I was looking for one that might be magnetic, justifying the hovering by making use of Mars’s magnetic field. But instead, I discovered that Mars actually doesn’t have a unified magnetic field the way Earth does. Magnetism remains in some pockets due to minerals in Mars’s crust that are magnetized, but the planet’s core isn’t generating a magnetic field anymore.
In the end, I decided that this was going to be one of the places where science met fantasy and just made up my own rock — an orange, palm-sized rock called the hovercore. I decided that the mining colonies had accidentally unearthed pockets of them during their expeditions, and that through experimentation were able to determine that, while dangerous, if properly handled a core can be used to allow vessels to hover.
Step Four: I asked myself the further question of “how does it allow for hovering”, and “why do we need dragons to pull the sleds if the sleds are hovering?” For these, I decided to continue to make up stuff. I decided that while Mars doesn’t have a magnetic field, it does have some other kind of field that cores are able to interact with, which allows for hovering. However, this field does obey laws of physics like friction, so dragons were needed to keep the sled in motion.
Step Five+: I had hovercraft! I was pretty happy with how it came out, and continued to develop the lore on the hovercore, adding levels of laws, conflict, and superstitions surrounding them, as I felt was bound to develop naturally in any human society — especially one that had found themselves on a completely different planet.
Your version of these five steps doesn’t have to be as clear cut as I’ve made it here — if you’re having a lot of trouble trying to make something work or fit in your setting, you may go through a process like this several times before you either make it work or have to concede that it just isn’t going to fit with the world.
So finally, let’s talk main takeaways:
Let science enhance your fiction and fiction enhance your science. Research with the intention of giving yourself exciting material to think about — stuff that makes you excited to write.
When creating a world, not everything has to be accurate, just plausible. Set expectations for how something works in your world — even a simple explanation works really well and lets you add to it later.
It’s up to you where science, fiction, and fantasy meet. You can make pretty much anything work if you put enough thought into how it connects to the world.
I hope this article has been helpful or insightful for you all! As much as I loved writing for Mythic, I was starting to miss writing articles like this one, haha. Free readers, I will see you again in two weeks, and paid viewers can expect another chapter of Sleepless this Friday!
I notiecd a typo, pretty big one. In the second section, 18th paragraph, you seem to have forgotten to TELL US WHAT THRUM IS MADDY