How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card Page A

measurements: the surface gravity; the surface temperature; whether or not there’s an atmosphere and, if there is one, what it’s made of and what the prevailing winds are like; the climate in various regions of the planet; its oceans and continents (if any); tides; and, finally, the likelihood of life and the kind of life it would have.
    The result can range from fairly simple things-low-gravity planets with very tall trees and animals; fast-spinning planets with high winds and very short day-night cycles; planets that don’t rotate at all, so that life is only possible in a very narrow band-to complex systems that give rise to a whole novel’s-worth of possibilities.
    A couple of examples. Robert Forward’s novel Dragon’s Egg came from a very simple proposal: What kind of life might emerge on the surface of a neutron star? The result was one of the best pure-science novels ever written, in which the coming of an exploratory starship from Earth, first seen as a light in the sky, gives rise to the first stirrings of intelligence and curiosity among the rudimentary life forms on the neutron star’s surface. Yet because the star spins so fast and time flows so swiftly for these flat, heavy creatures, by the time the human starship actually arrives, these
    aliens we inadvertently created have already developed spaceflight and have advanced past our primitive technological level.
    Indeed, Forward is the epitome of the “hard” science fiction writer. Himself a physicist of some note, Forward’s approach to fiction is almost entirely from the scientific angle. Though he’s a fine storyteller, the story is always the servant of the scientific idea.
    And for a large group of readers and writers of science fiction, this is the only correct approach to the field. Their preference is for the hard sciences: physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology. They consider zoology and botany to be rather suspect, and as for the “sciences” of sociology, psychology, anthropology, and archaeology, it is to laugh-to them, the social sciences are just subsets of history, an art more literary than evidentiary, speculative rather than measurable.
    To hear some hard-sf people talk, you’d think they invented science fiction and all these writers of anthropological or literary or adventure sf are all Johnny-comelatelies. Alas, it is not so-anthropological and literary and adventure sf all pre-date hard sf. But for a long time, starting with John W. Campbell’s editorship of Astounding magazine, the hard stuff, the stories that took science very, very seriously, were the very best work being published in the field. The cutting edge.
    Today the cutting edge has moved on-it always does-but more than any other kind of science fiction, hard sf has maintained a core of loyal supporters. Analog magazine, while no longer the leading publication when award time comes around, still has a larger circulation than any of the other fiction-only magazines, even though its stories fall into a very narrow subset of the field. Indeed, Analog seems to be the only magazine that regularly publishes formula stories, but the formulas work within the hard-sf tradition:

    1. Independent thinker comes up with great idea; bureaucrats screw everything up; independent thinker straightens it all out and puts bureaucrats in their place. (This story appeals to scientists and their fans because it is a reversal of the pattern in the real world, in which scientists generally prosper according to their ability to attract grant money from bureaucrats, a relationship that forces scientists, who see themselves as an intellectual elite, into subservience.)
    2. Something strange is happening; independent thinker comes along and after many false hypotheses, finally discovers the surprising answer.

(This formula is a reenactment of the scientific method, but endowed with far more drama than scientists ever experience in real life.)
    3. A new machine/device/discovery is being