Worldbuilding with the Soft Sciences

[marycatelli]

Opening with a discussion of what sciences are soft, and how biology, for instance, is moving toward hard -- one panelist defined a soft science as one in which you could not do many necessary experiments for ethical reasons.  (The lone guy on the panel observed that obviously soft sciences were what girls did and hard sciences what boys did.  0:)

Research.  The best way is to get bright ideas from soft sciences and build stories about them, rather than build your story and then try to fit it to what is known.

One person with a background in psychology disliked Heinlein after she realized that all the heroes were NT and all the villains were another type.  She thought this was bigotry.  (In which case, I would be in serious trouble.  I suspect that all my heroes are ISTJ.  But I suspect that the real matter is that sometimes you have to write the vein of stuff that you can write, and that this limits the types of characters you can draw.)

Discussion of equations.  When someone brought up Pern, I brought up the lack of changes in its history -- despite the big deal made about them -- particularly growth from population pressure, and from there the need to ensure your society can reproduce itself.  One panelist observed that was one level of math you did need even in the soft sciences.

Comments

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

Well, as with just about anything, when the results are good, you can forgive lapses. Ursula K LeGuin wrote an entire future history based on what she called NAFAL (Nearly As Fast As Light) starflight, which would almost certainly not be given such a grammatical name, and she cared not a fig how it worked; what mattered were the human consequences of that kind of relativistic travel, what it would mean to people and to societies.

(It's a facet of Larry Niven's adage, “Change the technology, change the society” - a civilization based on Millennium Falcon-style casual starflight is not going to be the same as one where a “starcrosser” is like a comet, might only arrive once in a century, but people have to get on with their day-to-day lives anyway.)

It could be argued that this soft science approach leavened SF and allowed it to rise beyond John Campbell gee whiz techno pulp and become literature. The greats of 1940s SF were those who caught sight of this and put real characters into their stories of gee whiz robots and rayguns.

[marycatelli]

To be sure, it's a question of whom it works for. Some flaws are more obvious because the knowledge is more widely spread.