I was just writing about the “magic like teleportation” bit recently in another forum, where it had been suggested that without FTL and time travel, SF would be greatly limited, and that “at the currently understood level of scientific knowledge, such stories would be mostly limited to the Solar System.”

I don’t think this is true. We know, now, how to travel to distant stars. It will take a long time, but we’ve spent millions of years getting this far; what else did we have planned?

Nevertheless, I don’t have a problem with the inclusion of FTL as an “allowable” possibility. I don’t think we know enough about the problem, including possible workarounds, to permanently exclude this.

Time travel actually means that we would no longer care about light as a speed limit, incidentally. Get to your destination, then travel back in time to the desired arrival chronology point. If it takes 10,000 years for the trip, jump back 9999.99 years; it becomes a weekend jaunt.

No, I don’t think this is possible, but it’s allowed by the rules, so it’s workable.

Making your science correct doesn’t seem to have anything to do with making the “technomagic babble” a center feature of the story instead of characters and plot.

As far as the suggestion to write “where the money is”:

The money appears to be in wizards and vampires and the general angst of young people with confused sexualities and sensibilities. But this is sideways to the issue, I think. Extraordinary people stories can be technically accurate without making a big deal of it, and the veriest tripe can be banal characters overlaid with gee-whiz babble.

And various famous past SF stories have not been “hard SF” in the sense that I’m using the term. They’ve included a “gee-whiz” technomagic feature that is not plausible, mixed in with their people-in-conflict tale. This is true from HG Wells to Heinlein, people that we also associate with hard SF.

A good example is Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination. That story is often considered one of the top ten SF books of all time. It is space travel, setting of other planets, and predicted cultural changes of the future. But it has, as a central issue, the ability to “jaunt” — to teleport some distance away by mere power of will, as an innate capability of the human mind. We would disallow this, but it was crucial to his story and its resolution. (A side issue: I understand that Universal is working on a film version of this book.)

Is it really true that “the more we push for scientific accuracy, the smaller is the size of the audience that will understand what we write”?

I don’t think so. Murder mysteries and police procedurals can be scientifically accurate, and they’re still popular. In fact, that genre has become widespread enough that inaccuracies and implausibilities are easily spotted by experienced readers.

Television shows such as “CSI” are derided by many because of their science flaws; making them technically wrong, intentionally, is done to add a gee-whiz factor to the story. Of course, many appreciate this show independent of the science flaws, but many people thought highly of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” too.

Hard science fiction doesn’t mean that the reader must be a science geek. It only means that if she is, she won’t be irritated by the liberties taken with laws of physics and such in your story.

If we could do magic like teleportation, it too will follow laws. But magic like teleporation is probably where the fantasy pushed into the tent. In fact the transporter is probably my least favorit aspect of Star Trek because if you had the abillity to dissasemble a body and reassemble it, you pretty much could live forever (or have your copies live forever), build buildings and ships without labor, etc. The only thing they would need is energy and raw matter (and based on some of the stories with the transporter I have to assume it works on the sub atomic level, and could therefore reorder quarks and mouns into whatever matter it needed)….

In all genra’s the part that draws me into the story is the attempts of the characters to overcome difficulties. In mysteries it is solving it, and in many cases us attempting to solve it before it is told. In fantasy we are looking to triumph through the eyes of the hero. In SciFi we seek to understand and solve the problems of the future. In contemporary liturature the same human element stands tall. I believe a good story could be translated into almost any genre. SciFi is particularly fun because it looks forward to the tools we might invent and how they will affect the world around us.

Please keep up your efforts. I’ve enjoyed the samples I’ve seen to date.