Putting the science into science fiction - part 1

I've been writing science fiction for a long time now.  In my twenties I was almost apologetic about what I wrote.  I used to say I wrote soft science fiction.  I used to shy away from anything which required a description of real science for its plot.  I didn't feel comfortable writing what was then labelled hard SF.  I was a lawyer, I didn't know anything about science.  I thought I couldn't put science into my stories, because I was afraid that I didn't know enough.  I was afraid of getting it wrong.

From the remove of forty years later, I can see so many things wrong with that now.  First off, my thoughts were being run by the Imposter Syndrome.  It was a classic case of 'I'm not qualified to do this, so I'd better not say anything .'  

But I'd never heard of the Imposter Syndrome back then.  The term has been around since 1978, when it appeared in a paper titled 'the Imposter Phenomenon in High-Achieving  Women' by Dr. Pauline Chance and Dr.Suzanne A IImes.  Which brings me to another reason why I didn't write hard SF back in the 1980s.

First, I had no access to this paper.  This was before the Internet.  To anyone younger than me who grew up with the Internet always being there you have no idea how difficult it was to become aware of leading-edge scientific ideas as a non scientist.  Virtually the only way was to subscribe to some    expensive magazines, which weren't written for the non-scientist.  Second, even if I had read that paper, no doubt  it would have been written in classic academic-speak.  It's often hard to glean the handful of hard facts a writer needs from such publications.

Today things are radically different.  To find the history of the Imposter Syndrome I turned to Wikipedia. It has to be used with care, but is a fabulous free resource.  The phrase "I'll google it," has passed into everyday speech.  Today if I don't know something, I'll search the Internet for the knowledge I need.  Or if I need more depth, there's probably a good popular science book that covers it.

On my iPad I've stored articles about plants under alien skies, types of rocket propulsion, DNA computers, hypercapnea, submarine diving procedure, and many more.  All of this is specialist knowledge which a non-scientist wouldn't be expected to know, and which I have free access to.

So those are some of the technical reasons, if I can put it like that, why I now write science into my stories.  But I'm not done on this topic yet.  There's a whole raft of issues about women's participation and visibility in STEM which bears on what women write, and what I write.  

So next week we'll look at the cultural and feminist issues which affect what kind of science fiction women get to write.