On Writing Romance as Hard Science Fiction - Reactor

One of the sillier pastimes seen amongst various speculative fiction aficionados is the dispute over whose favorite genre is a really just a subordinate subgroup of someone else’s favorite genre. Is fantasy a specific case of science fiction or vice versa? Are both to pulp fiction as Lystrosaurus was to Permian era therapsids? The whole thing seems to be some sort of irresolvable dominance game.

However, a hill I am happy for other people to die on is that romance is clearly hard science fiction. Or at least, it can be approached from that angle.

As you know¹, one definition for hard science fiction is: “a category of science fiction characterized by concern for scientific accuracy and logic.”²

Traditionally³, stories that were recognized as hard science fiction of this type focused on physics or chemistry. Why? The same reason that drunk people look for their lost keys near streetlights: those are the easiest fields around which to construct unambiguously hard SF stories.

Physics and chemistry lend themselves to a straightforward reductive approach, at least until you get into organic chemistry⁴. You can wrap a story around an interesting, potentially counterintuitive, physical or chemical phenomenon and be confident you’ll be able to convey the phenomena to readers in a manner that is believable, comprehensible, and fits into your allotted word count. Who knows? You might even get the details right⁵.

Biology, now, biology is intrinsically messy. Biology involves the behavior and interaction between organisms that are the products of billions of years of variation and selection, which are half-assed processes that don’t optimize so much as settle for good enough. Biochemical kludges abound; features are repurposed for tasks entirely unlike their original function. Frankly, it’s a little surprising we don’t collapse into organic foam every time we sneeze.

However, the upside of this, at least for the authors not dissolving as they suddenly grasp the existential horror of their essential biochemical absurdity, is that this messy complexity means biology offers a vast story space. Authors in need of interesting but counterintuitive phenomena around which to accrete a story have an ally in biology.

Still, while biology is complex, and it is not possible for any one person to predict every possible outcome, it’s not terribly wrong to think of most living entities as intricate automata whirring along according to the laws of physics (of which chemistry is just a specific application). Sure, that’s enough to get you from a single cell in the ocean to a former quadruped tottering around on two legs while focusing sound with what used to be gills. But we can do better.

If you really, really want a vast potential story space, what you want to do is to add the capacity for learned behavior. Once organisms can integrate observations about the world around them into their responses, once they develop means to convey learned behavior to other organisms, the number of possible permutations becomes vast indeed.

Which gets us back to romance. Any romance involves an insanely complex interaction between a bewildering number of factors, from basic physics⁶ to biochemical quirks to cultural values, to the unique qualities of the individuals involved. The capacity for astonishing outcomes is almost impossible to quantify or constrain⁷.

Even better, because the readers are themselves the product of such phenomena and in some cases may have a personal interest in participating in such things themselves, there is a good chance readers will be highly invested in the outcome of your scenario.

All of which is why any science fiction author seeking the highest possible bar for hard SF, and the greatest possible range of stories, should seriously consider penning romance. I am sure the results will be memorable!

1. Bob. ↩︎
2. To be honest, I suspect “technology” should be in there somewhere. ↩︎
3. He said with a confidence matched only by his lack of citations. ↩︎
4. That said, in the old days, a good way to get rid of grad students you didn’t like was to assign them the task of making aerogels, which involved at the time a finicky and failure-prone process ideal for inducing nervous collapse. ↩︎
5. Or educationally wrong. ↩︎
6. You can’t have Romeo and Juliet if the fine structure constant is very different. Also, if you really understand physics, it is much less likely that when you twirl an earbud in an attempt to catch the attention of the person across the table from you, that earbud will hit you in the eye. ↩︎
7. I know this because my favored bus route passes near a junior high whose bus-riding students combine a keen interest in socio-romantic field research with dismal success rates. One would expect billions of years of natural selection to have conferred on humans an innate knack for solving this specific set of problems. The fact that it hasn’t suggests that the phenomena are inherently difficult to model. ↩︎