Category Archives: Genres

Many of the people with whom I’ve shared both aspects of my life are surprised by the dichotomy. I aspire to being a best-selling writer, and yet work as a professional scientist. I take writing courses and attend cons, and yet got my degree in engineering. Friends on both sides of my life have told me that it’s weird that I can do both. After all, everyone knows that scientists are analytical, left brained, and writers are creative, right brained. You simply can’t do both. Well no, clearly you can. But I can see where they are coming from given how often scientists are miss represented in fiction.

Sometimes it’s as simple as factual inaccuracies. Those I can forgive. After all, who is to say that the fictional world works with exactly the same rules we contend with? However, I have a much harder time when it is clear to me that the author didn’t bother to take the time to understand how scientists think and view the world. For me, a character not feeling “real” places huge amounts of strain on my suspension of disbelief. So, in the interest of better writing all around, let me share with you four of the things that I’ve noticed “right brainers” often get wrong.

1. Science is BOTH a Body of Knowledge and a Way of Thinking…

The extent of scientific knowledge that humanity has managed to accumulate is mind boggling. Though people tend to think of science as one big thing, it’s not. Botany, chemistry, anatomy, rocket science, robotics, medicine, programming, all the flavors of engineering, and dozens of other specialties — it’s all science. I’ve seen plenty of fictional scientists who seem to know everything. That’s bogus. Sure, a scientific education is designed to instill a baseline of knowledge across a broad spectrum of topics. However, at some point (usually in college if not sooner) scientists tend to hone in on a very narrow slice of the spectrum and specialize. It’s not uncommon for a pure scientist to devote their entire lives to researching weight loss, looking for exoplanets, or working on ways to improve human-computer interactions. Though those may seem to be broad topics, and they are, they are each only one “book” in the library of scientific inquiry.

However, “science” is also a lens through which scientists and engineers are trained to view the world. That training gives its students the discipline and tools needed for problem solving and discovery. It also instills certain core beliefs. Fundamental to any of the sciences is the idea that the world works by following a set of rules. We may not understand those rules right now, but we can and should discover them through methodical observation and experimentation. Second is the belief in the need for ideas to be challenged and reviewed by peers. A single experiment or study doesn’t mean a thing until it is reproduced and verified independently. This goes hand in hand with the idea of intellectual integrity, which is sacred within the scientific community. Finally, the training of a scientist is designed to instill a certain degree of precision and attention to detail. Many scientific discoveries throughout history were made because something unexpected happened and the researchers were observant enough to notice the trend.

As writers, we need to ensure we cover science in all its aspects — both as a body of knowledge and a point of view. The first requires that we research our character’s specialties thoroughly enough that we don’t make major mistakes and break the illusion. I’ve found it helpful to consult with experts as necessary. Luckily, there are many scientists and engineers who are also fans of fiction, so it’s easy enough to find volunteers. Secondly, we must take care to ensure that we capture how a scientist is trained to think and view the world. We also need to know our character’s specialties, and whether they view themselves as a pure scientist (the sort who loves knowledge and discovery for its own sake) or an applied scientist (those who find value in doing something with their knowledge). Finally, we need to decide if we want them to be a generalist or a master of a single specialty. I’ve seen every combination work well, but it’s a significant decision that must be considered carefully.

2. Stereotypical Scientists are Rarer than You’d Think…

The sorts of walking stereotypes you see on shows like The Big Bang Theory do exist. Trust me, I’ve personally met more than a few. However, most scientists would blend in seamlessly with a crowd. Sure, there are some scientists who are uncoordinated and poorly dressed, but there are also scientists who are body builders, fashionistas, and martial artists. Some are socially inept and massively introverted. On the other hand, I had an engineering professor in college who performed standup comedy on the side. Furthermore, we don’t all stick with science as a life-long profession. Some of the people with whom I graduated have gone on to be actors and professional chefs. And while there is some truth to the stereotype that scientists are all either white guys or Asian, there has been a HUGE push recently to attract women and other races into scientific education and careers.

Admittedly, we still have a long way to go, but I always get frustrated when “futuristic” science fiction is filled with a group of monogender, monochromatic, hapless, and hopeless nerds. Science is, should be, and must be a diverse community. We need the varied points of view granted by many different backgrounds in order to truly explore the universe. Uniformity of demographic or thought quickly leads to stagnation.

As writers, we need to be pioneers of what’s possible while also honoring what is. We inspire our readers to follow their dreams and passions, especially when they don’t believe that it’s possible for someone like them to do something amazing. I am a scientist because of fiction. I know that I’m not the only one. We writers owe it to our readers to ensure that we represent all sorts of characters in our works, not just relying on tropes, stereotypes, and plot devices.

Be sure to return tomorrow for the Part 2 of Science Fact and Science Fiction!

Cryonics, or Death Swallowed Up

June 17, 2016

E. Godhand

Believability Emily Godhand Science Fiction No Comments

O’ Death,
Won’t you spare me over til’ another year
But what is this, that I can’t see,
With ice cold hands taking hold of me.
– traditional American folk song

Take the nihilistic assumption that humans are in the process of dying the moment they are conceived. Everything our bodies do is to maintain the process of surviving through creating, maintaining, and eliminating. Start messing with the supply chain, the fuel,the equipment, or the director, and the body has a problem.

If you can get it back up and running, good. If you can’t…things don’t shut down right away. Death is a process.

But how what exactly IS death? What does that look like?

The line between “alive” and “dead” is getting more and more blurred as we advance in technology. At this moment, different countries and different people define death differently. Ultimately, if the person in your story isn’t moving, breathing, and has no pulse, they’re probably going to go in the ground after a few minutes of being like that, since the brain damage sustained and the medical technology available is probably not going to get them to any livable state.

But what if you could? What would that look like?

“Not breathing.”
I can hold my breath; Am I dead? I can be choking or in laryngospasm when drowning; Am I dead yet? No? I can still have a pulse even if I’m not breathing, right?

“No pulse!”
Through chest compressions I can pump your heart for you and give you a pulse. I can run it through a machine and pump it indefinitely.

“No…self-initiated pulse?”
No pulse doesn’t mean the heart isn’t working at all, and you need an EKG (electrocardiogram, or a “heart strip”) read by a trained person to tell the difference between “ineffective pumping” (therefore not producing a palpable pulse) and “heart isn’t showing any electrical activity at all” (asystole, or ‘flat line’).

You could be in atrial fibrillation, which is basically the heart jiggling itself like jello. It could be persuaded to pump again, given a good shock to reset it. Why do you think they call those chest-paddles “DE-fibrillation”?

Note: You cannot use a defibrillator on someone who is “flat-lined”, or in “asystole”, where there is no electrical activity in the heart. You can’t de-fib when there’s no fib. You can’t reset a rhythm that doesn’t exist. You start CPR when you hear that flat-drone, or don’t get a pulse. Put the paddles down your doctors would know better.

In some countries, death is defined as no self-initiated pulse. Even in the US, if you can’t get the pulse back after CPR (if the patient didn’t have an Advanced Directive against it and weren’t considered “DNR: Do Not Resuscitate”), the doctor will generally call it (and the doctor has to call it, not the nurse).

There’s some wiggle room though. Even in asystole, the brain may still have electrical activity.
…Remember how I said that everything is breaking down, and that this is guaranteed?

Well you can slow it. You can delay it. You can even potentially reverse it (for the most part).

Since all things are made of cells, and cells are made of parts, and those parts are made of chemicals, and those chemicals are made of atoms, and those atoms are made of….well, they’re always moving. Even solids, like a table, are always constantly shaking. In place, but, moving. Everything is in motion in some way. If you slow that down, reactions don’t happen.

If you heat up a body, things start to break down faster. Fever can be dangerous because it can “denaturate proteins”, which means, it’s so hot, hot means moving fast, moving fast means shaking apart, breaking down.

So what happens if you cool a body, such as in cryogenics?

Yes, the ‘freeze them in time’ for future revival’ thing but that’s more cryonics.

Things slow down. Do it too slow, such as hypothermia, the damage won’t be stopped. The body is mostly water, so ice crystals can form and burst cells, circulation is cut off, essentially leaving the limbs for necrosis (and gangrene to set in).

But in people who have been cooled quickly, instantly almost, the process the body goes throu-…

Okay let me back up even more. Oxygen is required for a lot of the body’s processes. There is such a thing as a “reperfusion injury”, where oxygen is introduced to an area deprived, and suddenly it has all this…currency with which to pay the men to start destroying things.

“But it has oxygen! I thought that was a good thing! Shouldn’t it be happy?”

Yeah, but remember, the body is a jerk, and runs more like a bureaucracy. The paperwork had already gone through, they just ran out of ‘money’ on the project. So no oxygen, no currency, no processes. This can cause damage.

But if the body is cooled properly, it’s too slowed to actually do anything even if it has the currency of oxygen. It’s stuck in a stasis.

Some success has been made with patients who were quickly frozen by the environment or strategically frozen when in critical condition. We pull them back with slow warming and controlling and staying ahead of the destruction. One step back, two steps forward.

Imagine this for your story:

“Red” triaged patients who would normally be tagged ‘black’ (“don’t bother”) frozen to halt the death process until an appropriate level of care can be arranged.

A hospital that is overrun with casualties that can’t reasonably stabilize everyone without putting a few ‘on hold’.

A cryogenic chamber that flash-freezes and slowly warms the patient up to bring them back after space-travel or ‘until we have the technology to treat your condition’.

So here’s the million dollar question:

If we can pull them back, if CPR, cryogenics, and just…act of god for all we know, can make them alive again, were they really dead? And where is that line?

Squishy Humans: The Weak Link

June 16, 2016

Gregory D. Little

Authorial Trust Believability Day Jobs Gregory D. Little Science Fiction Tropes & Archetypes No Comments

This month’s topic is almost too good to be true. For an engineer, popular culture is like an endless fountain of improper physics to pedantically complain about. Seriously, it’s like crack to us. The best examples of physics in stories get most things right or are well-written enough to make us forget to look too closely. The worst examples are Armageddon.

Before I get into more specifics and insight a flame war, please view this post as seeking to educate, not ruin anyone’s fun. I’m willing to forgive quite a lot of bad physics provided the story itself isn’t cringe-worthy. That being said, there’s stuff we see in movies, shows or books that, given our current understanding of technology and physics, just wouldn’t work in real life. I’ll be focusing primarily on human beings’ tendency to go squish when confronted with sudden acceleration.

One of the questions I get a lot from non-engineers is why we don’t have flying cars. Over the years, I’ve come up with an only slightly snarky standard answer to this question. “Imagine if every car accident was fatal.” It generally gets the message across.

With that in mind, if someone asks why we can’t have an suit like the one Tony Stark wears, one problem (of many) is the number of high-speed impacts Iron Man sustains in that suit. If we assume the suit is made of super-light advanced alloys that could sustain high speed impacts without damage, that’s great news … for the suit. But if the suit is staying pristine, that means that it’s not absorbing the energy of the impact, it’s merely transmitting it. Sooner or later that energy must be absorbed, and if the suit isn’t doing it, the squishy human body wearing the suit is.

A great example of this phenomenon is with cars. Did you know that cars didn’t used to get all crumpled up in accidents? The invention of crumple zones, parts of the car intended to dramatically deform, was implemented as a safety feature. Again, something has to absorb and dissipate the energy of an impact. Crumple zones represent the car absorbing it and directing it around the driver. Even then, seat belts and airbags are required to keep the driver from getting slammed into something hard and unyielding. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Either the car is getting wrecked, or the driver is. If Tony falls from two hundred feet up and is brought to a sudden stop by the ground, the suit (aside from some scratched paint) might well be fine, but poor Tony … not so much.

Which brings us to the reason that all of this is forgivable. I’ve just spent several hundred-odd words telling you all the ways your favorite movies, shows and books are screwing up physics for the sake of excitement. But stories need characters, and most of them need human characters, or else they’ll suffer problems with relatability. While a real-life space-dogfight of the future would likely be fought at speeds too fast for humans to perceive, much less participate in (see Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks for a great example), most of the time such a battle would result in a story without any real stakes.

So what’s a science-discerning author to do when reality gets in the way of story? When possible, acknowledge the issues and try to make overcoming them integral to the worldbuilding or plot. James S.A. Corey’s series The Expanse does a great job with this, placing its human pilots in “crash couches” designed to absorb the energy that would crush their bodies and injecting them with “the juice,” a fictitious cocktail of drugs to prevent them succumbing to sudden, massive acceleration. These are great details that really enrich the setting and trigger enough of my engineering reward centers (presenting a problem and offering up a plausible-ish solution) that I’m willing to forgive them their stretching the laws of physics.

Above all, do the research. Treat your audience–and their intelligence–with respect. Always try to be aware of the rules you are breaking, and understand why you need to break them. Better yet, treat the rule as a storytelling constraint and try to use it to find a better way to tell your story. Many of your readers might not care, but you’ll make some future engineer reader very happy.

About the Author: Gregory D. Little

Gregory D. Little is the author of the Unwilling Souls, Mutagen
Deception, and the forthcoming Bell Begrudgingly Solves It series. As
a writer, you would think he could find a better way to sugarcoat the
following statement, but you’d be wrong. So, just to say it straight, he
really enjoys tricking people. As such, one of his greatest joys in life is
laughing maniacally whenever he senses a reader has reached That
Part in one of his books. Fantasy, sci-fi, horror, it doesn’t matter. They
all have That Part. You’ll know it when you get to it, promise. Or will
you? He lives in Virginia with his wife, and he is uncommonly fond of
spiders.

You can reach him at his website (www.gregorydlittle.com), his Twitter handle (@litgreg) or at his Author Page on Facebook.

On Writing Crime Scenes

June 10, 2016

fictorians

Craft & Skills Crime Marta Sprout World-building 1 Comment

Guest post by Marta Sprout.

Developing crime scenes that are both intriguing and realistic is a delicate balance. Popular TV shows are notorious for depicting scenes that are dramatic, but anyone in law enforcement would call criminally stupid.

Certainly you know that DNA results don’t come back in an hour or that you can’t snap a picture of a fingerprint, and one minute later have a match and a photo of the perp. NCIS’s Abby Sciuto knows more than a fleet of forensic experts rolled into one. Horatio Caine in CSI: Miami drives a Hummer, which would make a real CSI snort her iced tea. Not only do they not make that kind of dough, they are civilians, who do not carry guns or arrest people.

Here are a few insights I learned from an active crime scene investigator on how to get it right.

Real homicide scenes are messier, smellier, and nastier than anything shown on TV. Decomp is an odor no one ever forgets. Victims often loose more than blood. (I’ll let you use your imagination on that one.) One mistake often seen on TV is that they don’t consider the amount of blood loss that would be normal for each type of injury. They might have a knife wound to the belly and show buckets of blood spatter. Not realistic. Or Hollywood might have a character with a scalp wound and show little or no blood. Scalp wounds bleed profusely.

By the way, spatter is the correct term, not splatter.

The trick for writers is to view every element of the scene from the investigator’s perspective. It helps to draw out your crime scenes in detail so that they are vividly clear in your mind. Then, when you sit down to write, you’ll have all the evidence and elements of the surroundings, which will captivate your readers. It also saves you from discovering ten chapters too late that you had a key piece of evidence in a spot that doesn’t make sense.

So, how does a crime scene investigation work? A patrol officer is normally the first person at the scene. His or her mission is to “show up, call it in, and don’t touch.” Securing the scene is the first vital step. As a writer, this is a great opportunity for conflict. Imagine the possibilities. What if the victim is a superstar? A horde of fans might show up, including thrill-seekers looking to grab evidence that they can sell as murdermobilia online. Now your officers really have their hands full.

Next your lead detective arrives. Mistakes aren’t limited to the TV scripts. Every police department has had someone who did something stupid, even though they knew better.

Let’s imagine a scenario where we have a patrol officer responding to a call about gunfire in the apartment next door to the caller. On scene, the officer finds a deceased male on the bed, calls it in, and guards the door. Perfect, until the detective shows up. He goes straight to the body, checks for an ID, and wanders through the room, searching for clues.

What’s wrong with that? Enough to give a CSI nightmares!

He didn’t wait for CSI, who would’ve set down access tarps that would allow for visual inspection of the body without disrupting trace evidence.
He didn’t see a casing on the carpet and kicked it out of place. Remember: you only get one shot at a crime scene. Once something is moved, you can’t go back. Location is just as important as the piece of evidence itself. In our scenario (taken from a real scene) the victim had been shot by an intruder standing by the closet, but because the detective kicked the casing, that vital bit of evidence’s value is now greatly diminished. That could throw-off the court case, but for writers it’s an opportunity. What if your detective is the killer? His footprints are expected to be at the scene and he can “accidentally” disrupt evidence to protect himself.
When touching the victim, he could have left trace evidence from his own body and clothing behind and he would’ve left fingerprints on the wallet. Gloves, booties, and Tyvek suits are used to prevent scene contamination.
Everyone rushes in to view the victim, but many seasoned investigators don’t because it’s too easy to be distracted by the body and miss important details. The investigator I know starts at the outer perimeter and ends at the body. In one case, she found a critical bit of evidence along the side of a house. The victim was in the kitchen.
Before anything is touched the entire scene is videotaped, photographed, measured, sketched, and documented in detail.

Investigators are real pros at preserving evidence and knowing which items will give them the most information. Did you know that they almost never test pubic hair? They collect it, but in reality hair that falls out usually doesn’t have the root ball needed for DNA testing.

Have you seen TV detectives using a pen to pick up a pistol by the barrel? Wouldn’t happen, folks. Not only is it an exceptionally dangerous method of holding a firearm, you risk disrupting evidence.

Now to the victim. In most cases, the medical examiner takes charge of the body. Once it’s back in the ME’s autopsy room, the full examination begins.

By the way, dental records are only good for confirming a victim’s ID. Think about it. How are you going to find the dentist, who has the records, if you aren’t fairly sure of the victim’s identity? I saw a show where they used a database to ID a victim through dental records. Nope. I promise that the dental x-rays from your last cleaning didn’t automatically go into a national database.

Research is a lot of work. Why not just make it up as you go along? Two reasons: you want your writing to be credible throughout; and you don’t want to reinforce the “CSI effect” and teach jurors at trial to have unrealistic expectations of seeing a Hollywood style show, where everything is tied up neatly. Real crimes and evidence are rarely so tidy.

I hope you find this helpful. For more information, http://www.crime-scene-investigator.net is a great resource. I went through the Citizen Police Academy and have a hands-on approach to research. If you’re interested in doing the same, check with your local police department for this program.

Best of luck with your writing. Maybe next time we can talk about Killers, Cops, and Fire Power.

MARTA SPROUT is an award-winning author. The Saturday Evening Post published her short story, The Latte Alliance, in their anthology “Best Short Stories of 2014 from The Great American Fiction Contest.” Her essays and articles have been published in newspapers and major magazines such as Antiques Magazine. Known for her thrillers, Marta writes full-time, assists the Corpus Christi Police Department with crime-scene, training scenarios, and enjoys kiteboarding, scuba diving, and snow skiing.