Give a Reason

No, it's not about the second Slayers opening. Although one could totally write a philosophical dissertation on existentialism in songs from that show.

I was thinking about my "Da Rules" post (it's right over there), and how I said anything you could get from time-travel can usually be gotten another way—the only time you should have time-travel in the plot, is when it is the point of the plot.

And I realized, the same goes for science fiction in general. It isn't that the tech/science has to be the point of the story, but that nothing should be unnecessary. Anything you add to a story should serve either some main point, or artistry in general. And contrary to popular belief, you have more leeway in service to your main point, than to artistry.

For instance, take my book. I realized that my book is, in many ways, a meditation upon personhood—the aliens, the AI, the politics, are all connected to questions regarding the nature and dignity of man, his relationship to his fellows and the state, and so on. (Yes, it is a meditation—what, like a good action sequence don't belong in a meditation?)

I wanted aliens. And I wanted them to have fought a war with the humans. Now, the first Man-Kzin War notwithstanding, space-wars essentially require FTL travel, or they end up being a lot like a vampire-feud or the Alice Game from Rozen Maiden—deathless things we barely recognize as human briefly trading potshots at intervals of centuries. As that sort of war was not the purpose of my book, I feel justified in including FTL, especially since I gave it about as decent an explanation as it can be given.

I also wanted AI—totally in service to my explorations of personhood, I swear, and not in any way because robots are awesome. I promise. Okay that is a lie, but I really did get some cool discussions of personhood—and some bitchin' action scenes—out of 'em. And thus, my highly unorthodox workaround of Lucas-Penrose is eminently justified.

It was, in fact, a part of the plot that the zledo be vastly more advanced than humans, so I gave them several technologies I'd seen highly speculative papers on, like inertial control by stress-energy tensor metric patching. That became the basis of their engines and guns. They generate electricity by a technology derived from their superior understanding of space-time geometry, namely the dilaton alternator—quantum-scale waterwheels hooked to the expansion of the universe. It's pretty far-fetched, but since the relationship between quantum physics and the geometry of space-time is a science in its infancy, there is much room for speculation.

Having established that I need FTL and AI for my plot, and since there were humans in the story and we don't have either of those, I needed to set it in the future. Pretty much every piece of technology in the books that doesn't directly relate to FTL and AI, is just a piece of cultural-setting for the mid-24th century. Or, well, a prop, to advance the plot.

Meanwhile, the only thing I did in service to mere artistry, rather than to the plot/point/theme of the work, is the inertial compensation system, and artificial gravity. Such a thing is, probably, more or less possible—it bleeds the force of accelerations into the surrounding space-time. It would almost certainly, however, be less tidy and convenient than I portray it. Nevertheless, my plot would be unworkable if half the cast were gone for the time-frames involved in accelerating at 1 g, or if the people on the ships were in acceleration tanks.

Hmm. That the zled ships have artificial gravity while their engines are patching together stress-energy metrics might count as one too; though metric-patching is crazy theoretical, my impression seems to be that you'd probably be in free-fall while there. But free-fall is horrible, and, again, we have virtually no understanding of space-time geometry's actual functions—while we know, for instance, how gravity works, we still have no idea why it works like that—so it might be possible to create an artificial gravity well within a metric-patching space-time. The geometry of that situation probably makes math PhDs cry.