I had a very disrupted schooling throughout primary and high school and so missed a lot of foundational learning in mathematics and the sciences. Every other subject you can just about float your way through but in maths and science, not having those foundational skills really hurt me. This means that my science understanding is closer to a Year 9’s rather than someone in their thirties. On the other hand, my partner is the science one, but the gap between us is so large that often we need to go on learning tangents so that I can understand the original point.

I haven’t read any science fiction series because I was worried that I wouldn’t be “intelligent” enough to understand them but I’ve worked on my insecurities and realised that I’ve also misunderstood the entire genre.

I love The Martian by Andy Weir and one of the greatest things that the book has done for me is made me realise that novels can also be like movies and make even the more complicated science aspects digestible for someone like me who has very little of that foundational understanding. I don’t know why I thought science fiction novels would be written in equations or like journal article abstracts \(//∇//)\

I also forget that genre—like everything in the world, really—is a spectrum. There are probably more technical science fiction novels out there but that doesn’t mean I need to read them. What I do need to do, though, is read more science fiction in general if I want to write it. Less focusing on what I need to learn and more on how the genre presents so that I can see beyond what are my assumptions about it. There are a couple of books that I have read that are considered science fiction that I would never have guessed. And this is the part where I’m reminded about sub-genres! Too literally do I think about a genre and what it takes to write it.

When writing on a subject I’m not familiar with, there are three main ways I deal with it:

1. try to learn as much as I can without overwhelming myself with an entire discipline
2. focus on the angle that I’m confident that I can write from and leave anything “technical” to a surface level interaction
3. make it a fantasy world where I completely make up the rules to suit my lack of knowledge (/ω＼)

I don’t have the time to learn deeply about every facet of the world that I am interested in writing in, but the least I can do is try and acquaint myself well enough with them that I don’t completely not know what I’m writing about.

I don’t believe that writers need to be experts in every field they’re writing in—when writing fiction—but I do think there is a small obligation to at least make sure that it’s not completely nonsensical hogwash. A bunch of my little science fiction projects in high school make almost no scientific sense and it was more about using associations as themes.

How do I learn about new disciplines? Poorly. I am one of those people who types my question into Google, looks for a reputable site or digital book link and then ends up opening another twenty tabs as the train diverges at every station. Those trains take off without regard to the original question I needed answered. Typically, the first thing I look for is the most introductory information. If you build up from the easiest, it feels less intimidating and decreases the risk of hitting a wall that just completely deflates my motivation.

The one thing that I don’t do is write like I know way more than what I’m writing about. Others might be able to get away with that confidence but the most I can do is embellish it a little. And perhaps my humble acknowledgement of that will prevent people who are well versed in the field from dragging me over the coals (ᵕ • ᴗ •)

I don’t think it’s impossible to write science-fiction without a good understanding of science but it does help with the immersion if the science is the focus of the novel. I typically write stories that are set in sci-fi settings but aren’t necessarily focused on the actual science itself.

One thing that I almost always forget as well is that science-fiction and fantasy are part of a fairly tight venn diagram, the most stereotypical distinction being that one protagonist holds a computer and the other holds a wand.