There is a fundamental rule of fiction that you'll find in virtually any writing primer: Write what you know. If we followed that to the letter in science fiction, though, the field would be dull indeed. No warp drives. No manned spaceflight beyond the moon. No time travel, antigravity, force fields, nanobots, artificial intelligences, alien life forms, laser cannons, e-brain implants, or virtual-reality headsets. How can you write what you know if the things you write about don't exist?
And yet, nowhere more than in Analog, science fiction writers are expected to sound knowledgeable.
How to do this is a perennial panel topic at conventions, and as a dual science/science-fiction writer, I may be approaching a record for the number of times I've been part of such discussions.
Science journalism is the art of writing things you don't know a lot about. If you really were the expert, you'd be the one with tenure, publishing in the journal of It-Really-Is-Rocket-Science.
I learned this two decades ago, early in my nonfiction career. Late in the first year in which I actually turned a profit at writing, I was contacted by a food-industry publication that needed a West Coast writer to attend science meetings and hearings on regulatory toxicology. Could I do it? Oh, by the way, the first hearing was tomorrow.
The pay was good--roughly the same for that first hearing as my entire year's profit to date--so I said yes. That led to a decade in which I bounced from toxicology to microbiology, biotechnology to analytical chemistry, nutrition to cardiology. I even wrote about regulatory standards regarding insect body parts in salads and the best ways to ferment sausages to kill E. coli bacteria.
At first, it was an exercise in terror. My science background was in astrophysics, which was about the only field I was certain not to be writing about. What I discovered was that it really is possible to learn on the fly, especially under deadline pressure. There were days when I had to file stories on only a few hours' notice, knowing they would be scrutinized by executives wanting accurate, technical information.
I quickly learned the first rule of science reporting: If you didn't understand it, it didn't happen. It's a good rule for any type of writing that stretches your knowledge, and it has only one true exception: It may still have happened if you can quote it exactly.
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