Nadia vs Subject Matter Experts!
A reader named PT sent in a very nice letter concerning the depiction of nuclear fusion in Nadia’s most recent adventure, CLOAK OF SPEARS:###I’ve really enjoyed the Cloak Mage series, I purchase them via Kindle to read as I travel for work. However, I have to tell you – if nobody else has yet – that in the most recent novel, Cloak of Spears, you have an error which comes up multiple times. To wit, nuclear fusion generators don’t turn into atomic bombs. *Fission* generators can experience a runaway reaction, as we saw in Chernobyl and Fukushima. Even then, the likelihood of exploding like a nuclear bomb is extremely slight. More likely, the fission reaction will cause the pile to overheat, burning through the containment vessel, and starts cooling on contact with outside materials. Additionally, a fission generator is not as pure as it needs to be to make a bomb. Atom bombs are made from small, dense materials at 90% enrichment or more. Reactors are 5% or less and involve a lot of material to soak up heat and neutrons. A nuclear explosion is overwhelmingly unlikely.On the other hand a tokamak fusion generator – or any of the newer generators having some sort of toroidal chamber, is essentially just hot gas. It’s hydrogen fusing into helium under intense temperature and pressure. If you disrupt the containment, at best you have an explosion from igniting the hydrogen in air, but there’s no possibility of a runaway reaction.So if Nadia and crew were to disrupt the electromagnetic containment and/or cooling of a fusion generator, it would cause the physical containment to fail and maybe end in a small hydrogen explosion, that’s all.I tell you this as a Nuclear Chemist who moved into a regulatory compliance and auditing position after [REDACTED] years of making cutting edge research radiopharmaceuticals using both cyclotron and reactor created materials.Perhaps the rest of your readers won’t know, but you and I will. And if there’s any possibility of updating the electronic version – well, you could do that if you wanted, too.Thanks for your time, can’t wait to see if/how Nadia becomes an archmage!###Here’s the thing – PT is absolutely right. I have absolutely no idea how nuclear fusion works, and even if I spent the next sixth months doing nothing but taking classes on the subject, at the end I would still have no idea how it works.So, you know the real reason I wrote CLOAK OF SPEARS that way – I don’t actually know how nuclear fusion works.But! Henceforth, these three following reasons will be my Official Public Reasons for writing it that way. 
1.) For reasons of Public Safety, I did not include actual information on how to blow up a fusion reactor. Obviously!2.) I don’t want to get stopped at the airport. (See reason 1 above.)3.) It’s three hundred years in the future, the technology would all work differently anyway.But there is an important lesson for writers in this – the use of verisimilitude.When writing fiction, something doesn’t have to be realistic, it just has to feel realistic to the reader. Fiction involves a willing suspension of disbelief. If you look at a novel in the most literal sense, it’s a book of nonsense, people who never existed doing things that never happened, often in places like Middle-Earth that never existed. The reader has to suspend disbelief to read a novel, and the easier you can make it for the reader to suspend disbelief, the more he or she will likely enjoy the novel.That’s where verisimilitude comes in – making it feel real.But there is something very important to remember about verisimilitude.You can’t make it feel real for everyone. Someone’s always going to see through the illusion.To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.What causes the suspension of disbelief to break? It happens when verisimilitude fails, and the reader encounters something he or she knows would not work that way in Real Life, like PT and the fusion reactor above.The reason this happens is because every one has something in which they are expert, and it’s impossible for a writer of fiction to be an expert in everything. In the US military, they have something called SMEs – Subject Matter Experts. (It’s usually pronounced “smee”, like Captain Hook’s first officer in PETER PAN.) When the military has a specific concern they need addressed, they bring in a SME. (Of course, the SME may not actually know what he or she is talking about, but that’s a different topic.) A Subject Matter Expert will know the topic inside and out, so it will be very difficult for the writer to maintain verisimilitude for a SME on that particular subject.So, how to maintain verisimilitude? Here are some tips.1.) Do as much research as necessary, but no more. Writers sometimes have a bad habit of going too far down the research rabbit hole. We’ve all read books where it’s clear that the writer did the research, and wants to show it off, so there are pages and pages of unnecessary information about a topic. Infodumping is a bad habit for writers, and totally unnecessary infodumps are an even worse habit. Best to avoid them.2.) So how much research should you do? Just enough to provide the minimum details you need to tell the story. Remember you’re telling a story, not writing a nonfiction book. The research should be in the service of moving the plot forward. You should use only just enough detail to move the plot forward without getting lost in the weeds.3.) Realize you probably can’t fool the SMEs. That’s the reason you should use the minimum necessary amount of detail. It’s not possible to fool an expert, but if you use the necessary amount of detail, you can get by. In some areas of computer technology, I would qualify as a SME, and so it’s hilarious to see crime shows that get key details wrong, like IPv4 addresses that start with 678 or something like that. If you try to go into too much detail, you’ll trip yourself up. Like, for example, say you have the police trying to trace the owner of a website. If you say something like “we did a traceroute on the IP address of 678.45.19.777, which followed the router ping to the data center”, that’s complete nonsense. But if you say something like “the hosting company gave us the mailing address, which was a rental box in Nebraska, and the rental box company gave us the customer’s address”, that makes much more sense, is much closer to how law enforcement actually operates most of the time, avoids tripping you up in unnecessary detail, and it also moves the plot forward, which is the important part.4.) Conversely, if a core portion of your audience consists of SMEs, you’re going to have to do a lot of research.Recently, I was discussing books with a relative, and the books of Jack Carr came up. Jack Carr is mostly known for THE TERMINAL LIST, which was recently adapted into a popular Amazon Prime streaming series. Upon doing a little reading about Mr. Carr’s books, I found out that they frequently contained detailed descriptions of military gear and weaponry.Accurate descriptions of military/law enforcement gear and tactics is a common feature in thriller novels. Indeed, many people with military/law enforcement experience read these books, and so will spot something inaccurate right away. That means writers of thriller novels often have to do a lot of research, because a large portion of the main audience for those books has a considerable amount of experience with the technical details that might turn up.So if you write a genre where a core portion of the audience knows a lot about the topic and expects accuracy about the details, then you’re going to have to do a lot of research and there’s no way around it.I hope these tips will help you with creating verisimilitude in your fiction. Just remember, though – it is impossible to make fiction feel real for everyone, so don’t beat yourself up if you don’t. In the end, that’s why we have different genres. Someone would might find a science fiction book implausible could quite happily read a Western or a crime novel.-JM
1.) For reasons of Public Safety, I did not include actual information on how to blow up a fusion reactor. Obviously!2.) I don’t want to get stopped at the airport. (See reason 1 above.)3.) It’s three hundred years in the future, the technology would all work differently anyway.But there is an important lesson for writers in this – the use of verisimilitude.When writing fiction, something doesn’t have to be realistic, it just has to feel realistic to the reader. Fiction involves a willing suspension of disbelief. If you look at a novel in the most literal sense, it’s a book of nonsense, people who never existed doing things that never happened, often in places like Middle-Earth that never existed. The reader has to suspend disbelief to read a novel, and the easier you can make it for the reader to suspend disbelief, the more he or she will likely enjoy the novel.That’s where verisimilitude comes in – making it feel real.But there is something very important to remember about verisimilitude.You can’t make it feel real for everyone. Someone’s always going to see through the illusion.To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.What causes the suspension of disbelief to break? It happens when verisimilitude fails, and the reader encounters something he or she knows would not work that way in Real Life, like PT and the fusion reactor above.The reason this happens is because every one has something in which they are expert, and it’s impossible for a writer of fiction to be an expert in everything. In the US military, they have something called SMEs – Subject Matter Experts. (It’s usually pronounced “smee”, like Captain Hook’s first officer in PETER PAN.) When the military has a specific concern they need addressed, they bring in a SME. (Of course, the SME may not actually know what he or she is talking about, but that’s a different topic.) A Subject Matter Expert will know the topic inside and out, so it will be very difficult for the writer to maintain verisimilitude for a SME on that particular subject.So, how to maintain verisimilitude? Here are some tips.1.) Do as much research as necessary, but no more. Writers sometimes have a bad habit of going too far down the research rabbit hole. We’ve all read books where it’s clear that the writer did the research, and wants to show it off, so there are pages and pages of unnecessary information about a topic. Infodumping is a bad habit for writers, and totally unnecessary infodumps are an even worse habit. Best to avoid them.2.) So how much research should you do? Just enough to provide the minimum details you need to tell the story. Remember you’re telling a story, not writing a nonfiction book. The research should be in the service of moving the plot forward. You should use only just enough detail to move the plot forward without getting lost in the weeds.3.) Realize you probably can’t fool the SMEs. That’s the reason you should use the minimum necessary amount of detail. It’s not possible to fool an expert, but if you use the necessary amount of detail, you can get by. In some areas of computer technology, I would qualify as a SME, and so it’s hilarious to see crime shows that get key details wrong, like IPv4 addresses that start with 678 or something like that. If you try to go into too much detail, you’ll trip yourself up. Like, for example, say you have the police trying to trace the owner of a website. If you say something like “we did a traceroute on the IP address of 678.45.19.777, which followed the router ping to the data center”, that’s complete nonsense. But if you say something like “the hosting company gave us the mailing address, which was a rental box in Nebraska, and the rental box company gave us the customer’s address”, that makes much more sense, is much closer to how law enforcement actually operates most of the time, avoids tripping you up in unnecessary detail, and it also moves the plot forward, which is the important part.4.) Conversely, if a core portion of your audience consists of SMEs, you’re going to have to do a lot of research.Recently, I was discussing books with a relative, and the books of Jack Carr came up. Jack Carr is mostly known for THE TERMINAL LIST, which was recently adapted into a popular Amazon Prime streaming series. Upon doing a little reading about Mr. Carr’s books, I found out that they frequently contained detailed descriptions of military gear and weaponry.Accurate descriptions of military/law enforcement gear and tactics is a common feature in thriller novels. Indeed, many people with military/law enforcement experience read these books, and so will spot something inaccurate right away. That means writers of thriller novels often have to do a lot of research, because a large portion of the main audience for those books has a considerable amount of experience with the technical details that might turn up.So if you write a genre where a core portion of the audience knows a lot about the topic and expects accuracy about the details, then you’re going to have to do a lot of research and there’s no way around it.I hope these tips will help you with creating verisimilitude in your fiction. Just remember, though – it is impossible to make fiction feel real for everyone, so don’t beat yourself up if you don’t. In the end, that’s why we have different genres. Someone would might find a science fiction book implausible could quite happily read a Western or a crime novel.-JM
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