Obscure research

I've been working on a few different projects this week.  They all science fiction, but  very different, and it's got me thinking about the research I do for my stories.

I have an old novel which must date back thirty years now.  It features a starship coder making a ship sentient.  At that time, coding wasn't widely taught, and sentient starships based around artificial intelligence weren't that common in SF stories.  That novel of mine pre-dated easy access to the Internet, and a getting a quick basic education in a scientific topic wasn't so easy.

So, for that novel, I invented my own process for coding the ship.   This was well before algorithms and machine learning were commonly known about, so I made up my system based on common sense.  I reasoned that the ship would need all the senses we have, plus a few more, to make sense of its world; with some kind of central processor to combine the disparate inputs and make sense of them.

I made a big thing of my coder showing off her proprietary system.  That wouldn't work at all today.  But I stil like the setting of the story - a huge orbital shipyard - and I like the bunch of characters I created for those books.  So I think I will have to rework those stories focusing on some other tech.

On the other end of the spectrum is the environmental SF novel I'm currently pitching to agents.  There I'm trying to work out how a naturally-occurring internet might have arisen, and how it might work.  The colonists on that world are committed to not destroying it.

There I researched chlorophyll, mycelium, the possibility of silicon life forms, and hydraulics.  And that was just for the natural part of the planet.  On the tech side, the colonists live in prefab houses, dropped ready-made onto the planet.  They have cooking equipment, coms gear, and power and running water in their houses.  They're going to rely on printers to replace anything that get broken.  

So they need a way of producing their power.  Cue another piece of research: hydro-electric units,  I sited the settlement close to a river which tumbles down from the mountains, so there should be enough flow year-round to turn the screw and generate electricity.

Working out what my stories need can often send me down several research rabbit holes.  The bonus is that I get educated along the way.