Rocket Scientist

I’ve been given a lot of food for thought with the books I’ve just read, some very pertinent to my own writing.  Not to change my characters or the story itself, but in how to present them more effectively.

Since I know my own characters, I suspect it might be one of my failings that my introductions sometimes leave something to be desired.

And, of course, I still am missing a title.

But I also noted something and it reminded me of something I don’t want to do, one of those no-nos peculiar to science fiction and fantasy.  Let’s face, a book with shapeshifters (like mine) or vampires is going to have some scientific holes.  It might have sound science in other portions, but there will be some things that are likely, um, don’t make sense from science as we know it.

So, to all those aspiring speculative writers out there, if you’re dealing with something that doesn’t make sense from a science standpoint, don’t take the trouble to fake pseudo-scientific nonsense in the middle of the book.  It serves no purpose.  It’s tempting, I know.  I actually struggled a bit to explain how my shapeshifters’ mass changes radically.  It doesn’t work.  So, I’m going to not explain it, perhaps pointedly.  And explain in detail the many real scientific details that surround that wee little anomaly.

But, at least for me, nothing wrenches me out of a story like scientific nonsense especially if it’s not necessary.  For instance, in Breaking Dawn, the last of the Twilight series, the doctor vampire notes that vampires have 25 pairs of chromosomes and the werewolves have 24, as opposed to the 23 pairs of a normal human.  OK, tell me how being infected with vampire venom (the way vampires are made) causes you to grow 4 new chromosomes?  Mutate existing chromosomes, sure, but grow new ones?  Ditto for the spirit connection - people combine with wolves (dogs have 78 chromosomes) and we end up with one other chromosome pair, according to the good doctor.  Somehow, combining these shapeshifters with regular people (who only have 23 pairs) produces more with 24 pairs (instead of the reality: 23 pairs and unmatched chromosome or, more likely, a nonviable offspring).  Or that one with 23 pairs combining with one with 25 pairs results in a child with 24 pairs.

Um, no.  And it’s embarrassingly silly to say so.  If you have two unattached chromosomes from unmatched pairs, it doesn’t make an extra pair and it undermines a medical practitioner to say so with a straight face.  Describing these as mutated genes would have been much more believable and saved someone with a modicum of knowledge, readily gleaned from high school biology, from being wrenched from the story.

Now, science isn’t the only way to do so.  When one reads a historical novel or even a novel that touches on historical facts, reading where the author has thrown in something gratuitously (as is often done) that happens to be wrong can wrench a knowledgeable reader from the story, which is why I can’t read Tom Clancy.

Did I mention that my shapeshifters can’t breed among themselves?  They have a dominant gene that, like a manx cat, will kill the fetus if there are two of those genes.  But it doesn’t help my mass anomaly.

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