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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29057
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29057
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Most fiction that includes technical details get them wrong. Fiction does not sell based on the accuracy of its technical details, but on the strength of its story. Indeed, many stories absolutely depend on getting the technical details wrong, or, at very least, ignoring obvious technical solutions, in order to manufacture the turning points of a plot. Fiction is fundamentally moral, not technical, and if it is convincing in the moral sphere, its technical shortcomings are mostly overlooked or easily forgiven.

Where some point of plot turn on technical detail, the writer's art is more often in creating convincing bafflegab than in actually getting the details right. (This is akin to one of the other great truths of fiction, which is that dialogue is not speech.)

Of course, there will always be a few overly literal people who simply cannot see past these sorts of technical errors and will plaster the intewebs with their scorn. But you know what, your work is amusing them to, and as long as they keep buying your books to feed their habit, it is all money in the bank to you. Plus, their carping is free publicity.

There do seem to be one or two genre's where it genuinely does matter, where there is a higher than normal percentage of geeks in the audience that can genuinely sink your chances. Novels of the age of sail seem to be one such category. If you want to write about that stuff, you had better know a bowsprit from a yardarm. But even then, only for those books in which much of the action depends on the mechanics of sailing.

But this does not mean you can be cavalier about it either. Story tech may not be much like real tech, but it has its own conventions. It may be bafflegab, but it needs to be good enough bafflegab to satisfy the reader that you are painting a complete picture and not leaving parts of the canvas curiously blank.

Original score: 1