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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/30566
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Whose laws of physics...?

You're writing this world. If you can make it internally consistent, that's what matters. It doesn't have to follow _our_ physics, so long as everything hangs together.

If the plot needs a certain thing to happen, then a certain thing happens. The rest of the world just has to catch up behind it, and you backfill to keep consistency. That's it. If later in the book you find the physics needs to work a certain way for a plot event to happen, then you may need to go back and rewrite earlier parts to prepare for that. So long as you haven't contradicted yourself, it doesn't really matter when you do it. If you do find you've contradicted yourself, you've either got to change something, or you've got to figure out how both cases are possible.

Consider [The Martian](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18007564-the-martian) as a prime example. Andy Weir took extraordinary steps to make sure everything about Mark Watney's survival was physically possible, and Watney takes us through his reasoning for how he's going to make things work. (And several times, working out how he managed to screw up and nearly kill himself, so he doesn't make the same mistake twice.) It demonstrated genuine seat-of-the-pants engineering and positive thinking, not just some A-Team/MacGuyver "we just happen to have all this stuff to hand" nonsense. He's also careful to contrast Watney's own opinion of himself (the least intelligent, least useful member of the crew) with Mission Control's assessment of him (a brilliant generalist and an absolute master of lateral thinking), which is a great bit of character writing. As a book, it works on the hard-sci-fi level, on the "thriller" level, and on the characterisation level. It even translated fairly well into a film.

However the event which traps Watney on Mars (a monster windstorm) is utterly impossible in the thin atmosphere of Mars. Winds can be fast, but there simply aren't enough molecules to apply any real force to anything. Weir was completely aware of that fact, but he needed it for the plot, so it happened. And having created a Mars with wind and dust storms, Weir ensures Watney is constantly tackling wind-blown dust, and has to deal with a second dust storm later in the book. So the book is completely internally consistent, and there is no suspension of disbelief required (unless you're a real hardcore Mars fan, of course!) because everything hangs together within the "Watneyverse".

Original score: 5