The Day Job: Generating Hard Science Fiction Story Ideas Painlessly

Editors frequently bewail the paucity of hard science fiction stories, and many writers would love to be able to write them, but what, short of a doctorate in science or math, will give a budding science fiction writer the knowledge and background to write a hard science fiction story? Stan Schmidt, the editor of Analog Science Fiction, a bastion of hard science fiction (although that is not all that Analog publishes), at a WorldCon a few years ago, wanted to prove the point that a writer didn’t need to have a science or math background to write for Analog. Unfortunately for his point, of the fifteen or so writers who’d published in Analog who were attending that panel, twelve or thirteen of them worked in math or science.

So, do you need a degree in science or math to write hard science fiction? Nope. Numerous hard science fiction authors write their stories without that background. I’m one, for example. My college degrees are in English and history. Fred Pohl and Ray Bradbury didn’t attend college. Connie Willis was an elementary school teacher before her science fiction successes. Admittedly, though, the non-science or math authors will have to work a little harder to not write laughable hard science fiction. They need to cheat a bit. They may need help coming up with ideas, and they certainly will need help for the science that is not at their fingertips. Fortunately, the help is no farther away than the nearest bookstore.

When I’m cruising for ideas, a technique I like a lot is to head to the science section of the bookstore. There I can find more ideas within a step or two than I could ever come up with while sitting at home in front of my computer. For example, here is a handful of books I pulled semi-randomly off the shelves to write this article: The first is Kate Kelly’s That’s Not in My Science Book: a Compilation of Little–Known Facts. Opening the book blindly, I found this nugget: “NASA scientists report that as of 2006, more than 9,000 pieces of space debris are orbiting the Earth, a hazard that can only be expected to get worse in the next few years.” That tidbit spins around in my head, and I start thinking about who is harmed by this? Who might benefit? What unintended consequences might come from this? What if this goes on? What if we get to Saturn and discover the rings are mostly the Saturnian equivalent of discarded Pepsi cans and Baby Ruth wrappers?

See, story ideas.

A similar book to the Kelly one, and one that is chock full of ideas is Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. What I like about the Bryson book is not only does he present a ton of thought-provoking information (I’m still mulling over the fact that Yellowstone Park is actually a giant, world killing volcanic disaster waiting to happen), but he also tells revealing stories about scientists and the politics of discovery. If you want to read something darkly funny, look up what he says about the death of Karl Scheele, a Swedish chemist who figured out how to make phosphorous without distilling hundreds of gallons of urine. Bryson reminds me again and again that scientists are human, and so my characters need to be human too.

Another book that could be good for…oh, I don’t know…a thousand stories, is John Grant’s Discarded Science: Ideas that Seemed Good at the Time. Grant marches through a host of ideas that someone somewhere accepted as true, and then later were discarded, like the hollow Earth theory or the plethora of explanations for Egyptian pyramids. What makes Grant’s book fun and such a treasure trove are the stories that can spring from treating any of the discarded ideas literally. Parallel worlds where the Earth really is a plate balanced on the back of a turtle or where everything we see in the night sky is ice orbiting the sun in a rarified hydrogen atmosphere (sunspots are the results of ice “stars” that have spiraled in) spring to mind.

Ira Flatow, the host of NPR’s Science Friday, subtitled his book, Present at the Future, “From evolution to nanotechnology, candid and controversial conversations on science and nature.” What makes his book exciting for the science fiction writer are the arguments between scientists. Competing explanations for natural phenomena boil the idea pot for an alert writer. If you can’t see ideas for stories falling out of the discussion on dark matter and why the universe appears to be accelerating outward, than you are not paying attention. He starts with conversations about how the mind works, ends with debate about the search for immortality, and covers a bunch of material in between. Even if you don’t come up with some story ideas from reading it, you’ll be entertained.

I can’t end the article before mentioning Richard C. Hoagland and Mike Bara’s Dark Mission: the Secret History of NASA. The blurb on the back, all by itself, sets the story machine in motion: “Few people are aware of the hard evidence that secret brotherhoods quietly dominate NASA, with policies far more aligned with ancient religious and occult mystery schools than the façade of rational science the government agency has successfully promoted to the world for almost fifty years.” If your aesthetic leans toward the conspiracy worldview, this could be the book for you.

Story ideas for the hard science fiction writer are readily accessible if you go looking for them. I like my bookstore rather than the library mostly because the bookstore is nice and shiny, and they shelve the books in an inviting way (and there is a coffee shop with Internet connectivity). If I’m just trolling for ideas in general, and not specifically searching the idea-ether for science fictional ones, then I listen to the right kind of music, or go to an art gallery for an afternoon, or just read the newspaper. Ideas are everywhere!

For a quickie and insightful look at idea generation, you might check Ken Rand’s From Idea to Story in 90 Seconds: a Writer’s Primer, but for me, nothing works quite as well as an hour or two in the science section of my local bookstore.