Hello everyone. This is your editor Dr. Allen speaking, and we need to talk. No, I’m not going to bemoan my never-ending war to keep the reviews readable. No, today we need to talk about biology in speculative fiction. You’ve all been subject to my screaming red-inked rants lately, and for good reason. You see, physics in speculative fiction often gets discarded in the interests of storytelling. You see, in space nobody can hear you scream and writing space combat at a light-second remove is boring. Plus Faster than Light Travel is necessary. These are deliberate choices the authors make, and that’s okay. Biology though, it just gets forgotten, or mistakes are made in absolute ignorance because the authors just don’t care to look something up. This is unacceptable.
Don’t believe me? Gaze upon some of the recent reviews for evidence of it. The Noble Ark? What is this? Let’s leave the half-human/half-alien out of it for a moment, at least there probably is some explanation for that in subsequent books even if it’s bad. But why do the aliens have a craving for human CSF? If they need it so much they’re willing to torture people to death, how did they survive without it? Why not just make their own? It’s mostly electrolytes with a very low concentration of extremely common proteins like albumin. There is absolutely nothing there that couldn’t be synthesized! Then there’s the inbreeding. Everyone always forgets the inbreeding.
This problem goes far beyond relatively obscure science fiction novels and extends into extremely popular works as well. Let’s leave out the fact that raptors in Jurassic Park should have feathers and can’t bend their wrists the way they’re portrayed. The novel and movie have problems going down to the very core of the narrative; specifically that all the dinosaurs would be female. No. Reptiles don’t develop the same way mammals do. Denying a reptile the hormonal signals for sex differentiation will result in males because in reptiles, it’s high levels of the hormone aromatase that create females. With birds, we don’t even know for sure whether males or females are the developmental default, and it’s entirely possible that sex is determined at the cellular level before morphogenesis even progresses beyond a hollow sphere of cells. That whole thing is just wrong. Also, no biologist in the history of humanity would fill in the gaps with DNA from amphibians. They’d use the nearest relatives like crocodiles or birds to minimize the chance of genetic interactions leading to embryonic death. And the author is an MD for hell’s sake! Then there’s Interstellar. Don’t even get me started on Interstellar and the “blight” that somehow metabolizes nitrogen and yet somehow kills plants. Or how all the crops are dying but the trees and grass are somehow not completely denuded from the face of the Earth.
Do not despair. There are those who do their homework. Hambone (the person who writes Deathworlders) actually did do his homework. He thought through the consequences of different species growing up in different environmental regimes, not just biologically but psychologically and culturally. Even better, he thought through the consequences of certain exotic pharmaceuticals and what their mechanisms would be; then what the consequences of those mechanisms were. He never actually laid it out verbally, but those side effects are plainly obvious. Basically, there’s an anti-agapic/regenerative drug that works by messing around with some cell signaling pathways. However, the consequence of doing it that way is that people (special forces) on this drug are basically psychologically stuck in their late teens to early twenties. It is magnificent. Honestly, the whole thing is magnificent as far as I am concerned and it’s recommended reading. Warning, it is at this point rather huge.
None of this means, oh dear aspiring authors, that you have to shackle yourselves to known science or anything like that. What you should do - if you don’t want me to rip my hair out - is think about how biology affects your story and what kind of consequences there are for what you decide to do. You don’t want to have your plot turning on the fact that you’ve made a massive error by forgetting the consequences of a thousand years of ruthless inbreeding. So do your homework.
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