This blog post brought to you by a rather ancient memory that floated to the surface during my experience at family Aviation Challenge at the US Space & Rocket Center this weekend, where I braved 112-degree heat indices and the helo dunker (which actually turned out to be tons of fun).
In July 1995, I was sitting in my habitat room at Space Academy with my roommates, listening to what they loved about space and what had brought them to Huntsville, Alabama. It was supposed to be the place we’d find our people, everyone said. Our people, of course, meaning girls like I was back then, the ones who’d never quite fit in anywhere else. The ones who’d rather watch Apollo 13 for the fifth time over hitting the mall (thank you to my amazing friends who alternated accompanying me, even if they didn’t get my fascination).
“I guess I just like the stories about the people,” I remember telling the other five once it was my turn. “Where they came from, what made them reach for the stars, if they were ever afraid, ever had second thoughts about climbing on top of thousands of gallons of kerosene, how they felt standing on an object only a handful of men had before. And I love the idea of being here and experiencing some of those emotions, even if it’s only in a simulator.”
“Oh,” sniffed one of my roommates, an older girl who’d just graduated from high school and was headed to Virginia Tech in a few weeks to study aerospace engineering. “I don’t care about any of that stuff. I’m only interested in the technology.”
I never said about another about how I longed to understand people. I went off to college, earned a few obligatory STEM degrees, and threw myself into to the extremely logical and tangible field of aviation maintenance. Airfoils, cables, valves, transponders, combustion chambers. You could touch them, fix them, and on bad days, break them.
People?
Sure. They existed. They were beings who climbed aboard airplanes, the ones whose lives were in our hands—though they were distant, almost theoretical.
Because I don’t care about that stuff.
It worked for a long while, long after I’d forgotten why I’d stopped caring. And then, almost another two decades later, I began to write.
Despite a career that relied about concepts and technologies like the Brayton cycle and nickel-based superalloys, I found that I didn’t care how my characters got from Planet A to Planet B. I cared how they felt while doing it. I wondered if their hearts raced with fear that their starship might not be fast enough. I discovered that they were terrified of what waited for them on the other end. I even learned that they could find love in deep space—even as the hostage of an interstellar empire dead set on conquest.
And that’s when I discovered that just like that Virginia Tech-bound roommate of mine so long away, sci-fi readers want technology. They don’t care—nearly as much much—about character development. Contrary to every piece of writing advice out there, they want the most minute details of the metallurgical composition of a starship’s engine shielding. They want five pages describing potential futuristic physics discoveries that allow for space travel at speeds exceeding the Parker Solar Probe’s. They want to know exactly how a stranded astronaut would grow a garden on Mars.
But Anne, I know you’re saying, not everyone wants differential geometry in their fiction.
Of course not. Not everyone.
But there’s a reason so many bestselling sci-fi books (including one of the most popular hard sci-fi books of the past decade) focus on it. There’s a reason that focusing on characters and handwaving the science earns low reviews ridiculing the lack of science (especially if you’re a woman, but that’s a whole different blog post).
It’s something I’ve been dancing around—and avoiding the reality of—for a long time, which is probably obvious by my long delay in putting out anything new. If you’ve followed my writing this year, you know it’s not the only reason, by far. But as I sit here recovering from the five-hour driving home from Huntsville, still that same teenage girl desperate to understand what drives people to risk it all just to experience the stars, I know it’s something I need to figure out if I’m going to move forward.
This has given me a lot to think about. I would normally think that the opposite is true, that people prefer to focus on the characters rather than other minute details about the technology.
I’m someone who thinks a lot like you. I prefer focusing on what those people are experiencing, and I often just glance over complex tech explanations because they’re not what makes SFF fun for me. But at the same time, it wouldn’t be smart to ignore your experiences.
Perhaps some of us are too idealistic about what should be important in a story.
Still, maybe this isn’t the end of the world. Now that you know all of this, maybe this could open new choices for your writing. Maybe a balance between tech and characters could be something you enjoy? I don’t know. Food for thought.
I’m here for the people🙋🏼♀️