BBC Focus Magazine

[Zeke]

What are your opinions on them? Do you have any preferences if they are to be included?
Should they be passive or more active? Powerful or Weak?
Especially in "Harder" works, I can understand that it would be implausible without sufficient explanation which could be rather difficult!

Personally I'm nor adverse to it, however I like for it to be balanced. i.e. The user can't physically manipulate anything but rather has slightly more plausible powers. Say, telepathic impressions, both to and from a person. Or for more physical powers say actual pyrokinesis for it to draining to actually manipulate something that way.

As you can guess, this is (like most things I'll talk about here,) about my book(s) and I wondered your opinion on what would be practical / believable. I know that in the end it's my story and I can do what I want with it but like anything I like to observe before I act.

[KingPhillip]

Hello.

Science fiction, even the "harder" ones, depend largely on the author's imaginative extrapolations of current scientific knowledge. As such, suspension of disbelief may be required to continue reading further. Most outer-space adventures eliminate the wait between transmissions. How can that be when live reports from across the globe demonstrate a noticeable delay from question to receipt of question?

Robert J Sawyer comes to mind when it involves thoughtful extrapolations. Jean M Auel did well with (at the time) sparse pre-historical artifacts. Anne McCaffrey had a good mix of many different branches of science in her fantastical Pern volumes.

True science fiction, imho, would be stories that involve forensics, where real science is being done with testing and testing and more testing.

[Shadowwolf]

To be honest it all depends on what you want to write and who you think are writing for, thus there is essentially no right or wrong answer. You might write a very technical, forensic work filled with testing and entertain Mr King, however, I would likely not read it because what we want is entirely different. You will not please everyone so it is probably best not to try. Whatever your core ideas are for your story will likely dictate whether you can be very science orientated or whether you are making stuff up to get past the currently impossible.

It really only matters if you wished to write serious, by the book sci-fi because as there appears to be no such thing as psychics of any description, their inclusion may be out of place.

[Healerman]

I think you have to make your decision as to where to draw the line between known science and the "speculative beyond", and from there, keep it internally consistent.
The question of how "Hard" a work may be, is about personal taste. Looking back, there are highly speculative stories that have ended up being oddly prescient, whilst some "harder" works have ended up looking exceedingly naive.
KingPhillip mentioned McCaffrey's "Pern" books which are a personal favourite, blending SF and fantasy in a very enjoyable way. However, consider her book "To Ride Pegasus" and the series that it spawned, where a central theme is the blending of technology and human psychic ability. Worked for me.

In the end, you have to write it, and hopefully enjoy the experience. If it is for publication, then you have to consider your target audience and potential publisher...you'll have to please these people, and hopefully yourself, apart from that, the sky's the limit.

[M Paul Lloyd]

All good advice if you ask me, but I would like to add that if you take a few well known facts and sandwich a big fat lie in between them it often seems far more plausible than it would all on its own.

Its the formula they used for the X Files TV series and that seemed to do quite well.

[Zeke]

Cheers guys, I'll get back to you all

[Healerman]

Its the formula they used for the X Files TV series and that seemed to do quite well.

Are you suggesting that "The X Files" were anything other than the unvarnished truth? OMG!

[M Paul Lloyd]

Are you suggesting that "The X Files" were anything other than the unvarnished truth? OMG!

Er............ well you know. Possibly?

[Colm]

There's two problems with observing good physics in Sci-Fi...

The first is that you need to overlook it for the sake of drama... Especially in space... Imagine a universe where you couldn't visit other planets? Space battles would be such that enemies and other ships would be unimaginably far away and couldn't even be seen... You'd never have "asteroid fields"... You certainly would never have the thriving space community you see in "Star Wars". Not to mention the awkwardness of time-travel.

The second is a bit more subtle and that is that sometimes people expect certain things and think it *unrealistic* if they don't show up that way, unless an in-programme physicist explains why.

But then personally I prefer when they do follow the laws of physics as well as possible.

[M Paul Lloyd]

Actually Colm, when you think about it physics doesn't always apply in the real world let alone the realm of sci-fi.
I'm thinking of that part of big bang theory that requires the universe to have expanded from an impossibly small volume to around 98% of its current size in an impossibly short period of time, only to start inexplicably re-expanding at an accelerated rate.

None of which I can reconcile with what I consider to be real world physics.

[Shadowwolf]

There's two problems with observing good physics in Sci-Fi...

Very valid points Mr Colm but you might have missed a crucial 's' in the thread title, ""Psychics" in Sci-fi."

None of which I can reconcile with what I consider to be real world physics.

Though I would point out that it has been and there is no part I'm aware of that is impossible or out of step due to real world physics.

[M Paul Lloyd]

Though I would point out that it has been and there is no part I'm aware of that is impossible or out of step due to real world physics.

But how did the universe expand at a rate many times faster than the speed of light, surely this is impossible within conventional physics?
Also what made it stop and then continue to keep expanding at a gretly reduced rate and what is accelerating this process?
Things like 'dark energy' strike me as a bit of a fudge to be honest.

[Colm]

Ahh silly me, I misread psychics for physics!!!

[M Paul Lloyd]

Ahh silly me, I misread psychics for physics!!!

Well..................... that makes two of us Colm.

[Shadowwolf]

But how did the universe expand at a rate many times faster than the speed of light, surely this is impossible within conventional physics?

Afaik it was the very fabric of the verse that expanded taking everything else along with it as it does now, the Big Bang did not take place in space where the physical laws were already in existence. Besides the theory has nothing to say about how it began and never did, it is solely concerned about explaining the evolution of the universe after the event. This article explains things in a little more detail about some misconceptions about the theory.

[M Paul Lloyd]

A fair point Mr.S and a very nice article thanks, but I have to admit that I still struggle to make it fit with the physics I am used to. Trouble is I still tend to think of it as an explosion, rather than an unfolding........ although by 'unfolding' that would be a multidimensional unfolding rather than just opening out a page as it were.

I'm confusing myself now.

Must be an age thing.

[Shadowwolf]

If I'm understanding right, the physics we're used to were formed along with everything else thus they don't act as a set of rules to which the event must obey.

Trouble is I still tend to think of it as an explosion,

An unfortunate result of Hoyle's derisory nickname that became the popular short reference, and the simper explanations we get in yon science media.

[M Paul Lloyd]

To put into context, by the time the big bang required inflation theory I had left school and was engrossed in memorising the complexities of jet propulsion.
I recall reading about it all and thinking how much it sounded like something from science fiction rather than the real world that I was used to.

It's definitley an age thing. .

[Colm]

OK Psychics in Sci-Fi - they are not beyond the bounds of possibility.

Take Telepathy for instance - communication without using the traditional senses... Is radio communication a form of telepathy? Maybe not because we have a name ("radio") for it... But imagine undiscovered "Brain-waves" which people may give off and someone else - through evolution or something else - gained the ability to read and decipher them.

In the land of the blind, would visual communication be described as telepathy?

Then there is the ability to predict the future - well any Sci-Fi that uses time travel (which is nearly all of them) can't pooh pooh "prophecy" - even if there isn't a character who has brought the information back, there could be tachyon winds or chronoton streams or something that could somehow carry information backwards through time, and a psychic could have the ability (even if they don't understand how it works) to somehow detect and decipher the info.

Then telekinesis - well that's a lot tougher than telepathy because now your brainwaves have to be powerful enough to have an effect on real matter - and doing something like that with the "known" forces is difficult enough - light, sound, electro-magnetism. To work in Sci-Fi telekinesis would have to be a force subtle enough that it has not yet been discovered and yet powerful enough that it can move real objects - a difficult proposition.

But I like to keep an open mind that "anything" is possible in the future. Things are commonplace now that would have been unthinkable or ridiculous 200 years ago, simply because every now and again someone makes a life-changing discovery that no one before them envisaged (e.g. the microchip) which opens up a whole new world of possibility - For example ask your average person in the year 1800 if it would ever be possible for me to speak to a person in Australia while living in Ireland and the reply would be simple: Not a chance, there is no earthly phenomenon that can make a sound loud enough to carry all the way around the world. And that makes perfect sense.

[Shadowwolf]

To work in Sci-Fi telekinesis would have to be a force subtle enough that it has not yet been discovered and yet powerful enough that it can move real objects - a difficult proposition

Depends how much science your sci-fi has, if you're not averse to bending things or making stuff up wholesale then anything goes. You just have to be careful that your inventions don't create issues later on.