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One of the women in my NaNo write-in group this year is attempting to write a science fiction novel for the first time.  At last Sunday's write-in she confessed to not knowing what she was doing, and to being far outside her comfort zone.  The SF writers in the group laughed, and told her she was in good company.  We often don't know what we're doing either.  And we often make things up which aren't supported by science as we know it at this time.

Take faster-that-light drives, for example. So far, we don't know for certain that it can be done.  But I've seen a couple of thoughts from scientists recently, speculating that the speed of light might not be an absolute restraint.  Whether it is or not, science fiction writers need a way around this inconvenient bit of science, or our characters would never travel the galaxy.   

Like many other SF writers, I use jumpdrives to power my ships into hyperspace.  Some writers call it subspace, others the higher dimensions.  Whatever we call it, none of us have the faintest idea how a faster-than-light drive works.  Many of us have adopted the convention that a ship jumps from normal space, or realspace, into some different dimension.  This might be an attempt to appease Einstein.  Look, okay, we say.  Nothing can travel at the speed of light, but what if it could jump beyond that barrier, travel faster than light?

This is where a writer's creativity comes in, imagining how the process would work.  We don't explain it.  We just describe it.  I reckon that transitioning between two realities would be uncomfortable, so I have characters who think their arms and legs are falling off.  I mess with their vision, and I transpose speech into howls.

I think this is the only way to do it.  You can read astronaut books about getting to low Earth orbit and living on the ISS, but real experience doesn't exist for interstellar jumps.  We get to decide how that  process works.  We still need to use real science for things like shuttle landings.  But when we're on our big interstellar ships we call the shots.  How are their drives powered?  By handwavium, of course.

But in the end it's the human (or alien) story which matters.  The struggles, alliances, losses and gains they suffer.  Sometimes we delve into moral questions, like sentience in AI, and what rights those sentient AIs should be granted.  If we need interstellar drives to support our stories, then we'll continue to use handwavium to power them.