This article by Mark Rosenfelder (creator of Zompist.com) has been bouncing around in my head for the past month. I finally articulated a response as I was scanning Slashdot and Wired, and noticed what I was doing. Learning about a new scientific advancement is like a shot of creative adrenaline. I hear about some new tech and I immediately start thinking of the next generation or new applications.
Here’s the heart of my response to Rosenfelder’s article. Once you start trying to play the scientist by figuring out exactly how some cool gadget would work in the real world, you usually run into a wall. And understandably so; the present is plagued by the apparently impossible. But, historically, human beings are pretty good at figuring out how to do new things, and the most conservative visions of the future often fall short. Naysayers who proclaim “we’ll never be able to do X” face exponentially increasing odds of being proven wrong as time passes. If it’s in the future, who’s to say what’s impossible?
Many hard sci-fi writers would do it differently, but I say go ahead and give your space rangers laser swords. Don’t strain yourself by trying to figure out how it works—that’s the scientist’s job. Writers can afford to keep their heads in the clouds. Okay, maybe “afford” was a poor word choice. But you know what I mean.