When I wrote the medical/psychological/conspiracy thrillers Miracle Man and The Austin Paradox, I was confronted with these same issues. So what can an author do? I can only speak from my own experience. Too little detail and the author is asking the reader to take giant “leaps of faith,” and this undermines the credibility of a science-fiction story. Too much detail easily becomes boring and makes the reader think he is back in school. If a work of science fiction is to be believable and engrossing, the science in it must be plausible-and the science must be understandable to the reader. Bad quality science fiction is painfully obvious even to the casual reader. So, when sitting down to write a work of science fiction, the writer has to rise to the standard. And science-fiction readers have real standards that they’ve developed by reading the great writers who developed the genre-and also by seeing countless good quality science-fiction movies and television programs. But you do when you read science fiction. You don’t have to think or concentrate when you read a romance novel. That’s why it’s not the most popular genre-romance novels are. Science fiction places demands on a reader. A reader needs to think and to concentrate. Reading science fiction isn’t easy reading. Readers of science fiction are generally sophisticated. It’s not called “science” and it’s not called “fiction.” It’s called “science fiction,” and that means that if an author is going to successfully wade into those waters, it requires a balancing act.
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