Words matter. These are the best Edward M. Lerner Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Authors like reading. Go figure. So it’s not surprising that we sometimes bog down in the research stage of new writing projects.
Happily, researchphilia is not the problem it once was. The Internet makes just-in-time research very practical.
I have to believe SF writers will continue to inspire the public to have faith in – to demand! – a future that is at least as big and bold as the past.
I like to think readers appreciate a well-drawn near-future as well as a well-drawn far-future.
In mainstream literature, a trope is a figure of speech: metaphor, simile, irony, or the like. Words used other than literally. In SF, a trope – at least as I understand the usage – is more: science used other than literally.
The biggest fatal flaw in most fictional portrayals of nanotech – what sends those books arcing across the room – is ignoring that the nanobots need energy to do… anything.
Readers and viewers will differ about what’s totally standalone, what’s totally serially dependent, and what’s merely enriched by reading/viewing in a particular order.
Too much detail can bog down any story. Enough with the history of gunpowder, the geology of Hawaii, the processes of whaling, and cactus and tumbleweed.
What SF author or fan isn’t interested in human space travel? I’ve yet to meet one.
Time travel offends our sense of cause and effect – but maybe the universe doesn’t insist on cause and effect.
Anything that can unambiguously represent two values – while resisting, just a wee bit, randomly flipping from the state you want retained into the opposite state – can encode binary data.
It would help if human experts agreed on the meaning of such basic terms as intelligence, consciousness, or awareness. They don’t. It’s hard to build something that’s incompletely defined.
One of the bedrock principles of physics is the conservation of energy. In this universe, energy can be neither created nor destroyed.
The medical nanobots in my novel ‘Small Miracles’ tap the energy sources that the patient’s own body provides. That is, they can metabolize glycerol and glucose, just as the cells in our bodies do.
The distinguishing characteristic of the techno-thriller is technical detail.
