Pushing the envelope

 Following on from last week’s thoughts about being too grounded, I’m challenging myself to make ideas work this week.  I wrote a short story about trees communicating by  scent many years ago.  I like it very much, but I’ve always got hung up on the idea of humans learning their language,

In the original story I had a character build a scent transmitter/receiver and learn to talk to the trees. Re-writing the story this week, I still got hung up on the impossibility of  her learning an alien language without recourse to any kind of primer or Rosetta Stone.  My brain feels the need to explain exactly how this would work.

But I’m writing science fiction, and this is where the fiction part comes in.  In a way, it's strange that I’ve got hung up on this particular issue just because I don’t know how it would work I real life, because that’s the case with a lot of the things I wrote about.

Take artificial  gravity. When I write a story set on a starship I give that ship artificial gravity. That means humans who live aboard the ship can operate normally. They can stay aboard long-term without needing to worry about damage to their bodies from living in zero-g.

I'll happily use this idea in a story, and yet I have no idea how artificial gravity would work. We haven’t invented it yet. Or take the other regular science fiction idea of a starship travelling faster than light.  Many writers do this, and I do too.  We can’t ignore the real science which tells us that the universe is a very big place. But we wouldn’t have pan galactic empires spread out across thousands of worlds if we didn’t have a convenient - and relatively short duration -way of travelling between the stars.

Enter the hyperspace jump, wormholes, and jumpgates.  We know wormholes exist, but we have no idea if hyperspace jumps are possible.  And yet they’re so familiar in SF that I’ll happily use them.

I’m realising that where I hesitate is in extrapolating the capabilities  of pants and animals. And I think that’s because that’s less common in SF.  My Imposter Syndrome kicks in and says that nobody’s done whatever I’m doing before, and that people will laugh at my ideas.

But that’s just the reason to include such things in a story.  It makes them unique. Anyway, my rewrite of the chemically-transmitting trees stories is now done, and I’m about to send it out on submission.