Thoughts on SciFi Tech

While somewhat mechanically inclined, I am not modern-tech savvy and have never wanted to be. I am a spoiled writer person who has no real interest in knowing exaclty how a computer works, much less all the new gadgets that come out. It is a tool. I expect it to work in a way I am familiar with and if it doesn’t, I start calling for my husband who is tech savvy. Yet, the first main character in the Talmanor trilogy is an engineer. Go figure.

Maybe it is because, as much as I love Andre Norton’s work, I do not agree with her anti-tech possition that mechanical/technical aptitude could not coincide with life sciences and/or psyhic ability. I excelled in both sides of that fence in high school and threw in some serious art classes as well. I think it’s safe to say I am not by any means alone in feeling that way these days.

That being said, I have good reasons for caution in getting too indepth in exactly how any given tech works. Think about some of the older Scifi from the 50′s. We used rockets as launch vehicles back then and it looked like that was the way things were going. No one had come up with other ideas at the time, not publically anyway. Man had not yet actually walked on the moon. Space probes had not been dispatched to tell us how inhospitable Mars is or the poisonous atmosphere of Venus. Older books are full of what we now know are impossibilities, or at least improbabilities. Those books are dated by their technical knowledge.

I make up my own star systems for that exact reason. I have absolutely no intention of trying to explain my theory on how the Coalition’s hyperdrives work. First of all, that theory is not important to the story. Second, I don’t want to saddle the books with something that may prove to be silly to others twenty years from now. Outdated tech can jar a reader right out of the story and leave them shaking their heads at what is now an obvious error.  As knowledge changes, perceptions and expectations change. We no longer think in terms of colonizing another world in a giant rocket. Star Trek began to get us out of that box and Star Wars confirmed it, interstellar vehicles will be whatever shape we need them to be.

I deviate from that only when it’s relevant to the story and plausible enough to hopefully stand the test of time. My personal exception to tech explanations is something Sorth devised that allows telepathic control of computers and other devices. It involves the use of a particualr crystal found on their world that happens to be responsive to psychic energy. As crystals of various kinds have been used in electronics, going back to crystal radios and certainly to modern computer chips, I think I’m safe here.

Shameless plug time If you want the details, you’ll have to wait for the new trilogy now in progress. When I go back to that earlier time in Sorth’s history, I get to play with tech in a serious way. Some of the things that are common in Selarial’s time were fairly new, or just being developed. I am having fun with the process of developing new tech, but I still haven’t found out how one of their spaceships ended up inside a mountain. I suspect I won’t till the end of that trilogy.

Oh, wait, I better finish the Talmanor trilogy first. Darn, I was having so much fun.