A rant about Sci-fi

[shah8]

I said light reading for smart people. Or more aware readers. Or good light fiction with real minority characters. I was never really talking about science, but more about anti-intellectualism--one that covers the broad gamut of people not buying books if it seems "urban", or people badmouthing books that they are aware that they don't understand, or if it has RACE or POLITICS or RELIGION in big blinking letters and thus makes them uncomfortable. Because you know, if you look in the bargain bins of good bookstores everywhere, you'll find barely known authors who wrote a good book or two and then left the scene or the genre, say anything by Doris Piserchia, in particular I, Zombie. It's a struggle for anyone, ESPECIALLY WOMEN, to develop an appreciative sci-fi audience by writing books that aren't especially lowest common denominator. Read enough author blogs, and one realizes that even great and well known white male authors struggle alot to make a living while writing something that isn't super accessible. Even when writers try to write something that's accessible but still what they want to write about, in their voices, you can check out amazon for comments on DD Barant or Alyssa Sheckly?'s books, and see people who obviously didn't understand the nature of their books trashing them. And they write stuff that anyone, really, can read. Therefore, even if TA Pratt is continuing to write his series, the dropping by the publisher still stings.

I didn't really mean to tee off on needle, but this is a pretty big sore point for me. Do a little Amazon Listmania crawling, and you'll find tons of really great books that only a few rabid fans know about, but author didn't make any money and wandered off to a day job. And their books weren't hard to read with science and stuff. It's just an entire world of picky eaters that I want to just slap and make them drink a super premium darjeeling and eat fresh off the boat sushi, and cry see, SEE? That Was Pretty Good, Wasn't It?!!!!!!

[Shryke]

Anyone else think it's kind of sad/strange that not loading down your book with Tom Clancy-esque technobabble is considered "dumbing it down"?

[Zoë Sumra]

Anyone else think it's kind of sad/strange that not loading down your book with Tom Clancy-esque technobabble is considered "dumbing it down"?

Mmm, I was thinking that. :)

[needle]

Shah, I'm not sure that you're really talking about the same thing at all any more. You're really just kind of bemoaning the fate of unknown authors here. And while that's interesting, it's perhaps another discussion?

[The Evil Hat]

I said light reading for smart people. Or more aware readers. Or good light fiction with real minority characters. I was never really talking about science, but more about anti-intellectualism--one that covers the broad gamut of people not buying books if it seems "urban", or people badmouthing books that they are aware that they don't understand, or if it has RACE or POLITICS or RELIGION in big blinking letters and thus makes them uncomfortable. Because you know, if you look in the bargain bins of good bookstores everywhere, you'll find barely known authors who wrote a good book or two and then left the scene or the genre, say anything by Doris Piserchia, in particular I, Zombie. It's a struggle for anyone, ESPECIALLY WOMEN, to develop an appreciative sci-fi audience by writing books that aren't especially lowest common denominator. Read enough author blogs, and one realizes that even great and well known white male authors struggle alot to make a living while writing something that isn't super accessible. Even when writers try to write something that's accessible but still what they want to write about, in their voices, you can check out amazon for comments on DD Barant or Alyssa Sheckly?'s books, and see people who obviously didn't understand the nature of their books trashing them. And they write stuff that anyone, really, can read. Therefore, even if TA Pratt is continuing to write his series, the dropping by the publisher still stings.

I didn't really mean to tee off on needle, but this is a pretty big sore point for me. Do a little Amazon Listmania crawling, and you'll find tons of really great books that only a few rabid fans know about, but author didn't make any money and wandered off to a day job. And their books weren't hard to read with science and stuff. It's just an entire world of picky eaters that I want to just slap and make them drink a super premium darjeeling and eat fresh off the boat sushi, and cry see, SEE? That Was Pretty Good, Wasn't It?!!!!!!

First off, I doubt you'll find anyone here who considers an unknown author worthless by default, and I'm fairly confident that most people here do try and seek out relatively unknown authors for new reading material. More importantly, though, you're assuming that the only possible reason someone could dislike these books is that they're too damn simple to understand them. I'll admit that I haven't read any of the specifically mentioned books, but you yourself have admitted the difficulties of combining hard science and good prose, so perhaps the people simply didn't like the books, regardless of whether or not they understood the science? Why is preferring a prose-centered story with relatively ungrounded science less intellectually supportable than something with poor prose, but solid scientific reasoning? I'm pretty sure that there're a bevy of intellectual fields out there besides science.

[shah8]

Well, for one, there isn't very much technoBABBLE in Blindsight. What there is of it is stuff to keep the plot moving ect, ect. Having science stuff is not technobabble. Made up wholesale science stuff like what you see in Star Trek and on TV shows by JJ Abrams is technobabble.

Needle, I decried the attitude that I percieved in your first post. Simply that you felt entitled to say a book was bad because you didn't understand the science, almost as if the science is a flaw, when that science was a major reason it made the nomination lists. There is, in fact, a whole wide world of books to your taste and there is nothing wrong with Blindsight not being to your taste. For me, I think there aren't enough books like that and especially that there aren't enough lighter books that are interesting, precisely because of such (if not quite vehement, vocal) opposition by people like you. Moreover, I think many people would enjoy such books if they didn't insist on total comprehension and nearly complete comfort from intellectual turmoil. So there are so many fewer good books written, which was the *impact* that I was describing.

[Poobah]

I can be only glad that I am a well educated man, who didn't forsake the sciences while he studied other things. Blindsight is profoundly brilliant, and while I didn't take so much out of it the way Squire did, my previous exposure to neurology and philosophy stood me in good stead. I also have to say that I'm very hostile to the general tone of the OP. First, it sort of sounds like the kind of entitled whining that people with inferiority complexes do, like that guy in the Superbowl commercial who condescends/taunts the women who were have a book discussion on Little Women. Second, just about any book worth reading is going to challenge you, whether it's science fiction, mystery, general fiction, whatever. Through emotional work, or keeping up with the event threads and ambitions of the characters, or whatever. Thus the inferiority. I can't really help you with the not knowing science part, but hear me out, true, hard, sci-fi is always going to be tendentious because true science is a tedious amalgation of "it is not so". Greg Egan's Permutation City is not all that difficult in science terms, and certainly not nearly as difficult as, say, Schild's Ladder, but it's a fairly difficult book in other terms though, and one does not read Greg Egan in general for sedate reading. One read Greg Egan to friggin' light your brain on fire and spend the aftermath weaving what ifs in your mind after you turn the last page. To sweep to something a little lighter, Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman series and Neal Stephenson's Anathem are substantially the same story, even though the Steerswoman stuff starts out much lighter and is always much less demanding in terms of background knowledge. However, by the second book, and definitly by the third, your imagination and reasoning is taxed about as hard or more than if you're reading Anathem (it gets to Douglass Hofstadter levels). Let's go to something even lighter, social science fiction! Kit Witfield and Octavia Butler are two good examples of writers who are superficially soft, but are as every bit as "hard" as Peter Watts. In fact Octavia Butler and Peter Watts are essentially very similar kinds of writers, even though she only has dabs of biology and he throws the Complexity Theory texts at you. Octavia Butler and Kit Witfield does alot of "science of power" stuff. In general, I'm hoping that I'm showing that you will not ever *really* escape the fact that good books, the truly good stuff will always make big demands on you, whether it's knowlege, reasoning, imagination, empathy, whatever.

I get sorta mad about this kind of thing because this general attitude among the reader populace means that truly great stuff gets stopped, like TA Pratt's Marla Manson stuff (She does stuff like drop terms Schwartzchild Radius in a perfectly normal conversation about space in a junkyard--in an urban fantasy series). Same with Jane Lindskold's wolf stuff stopping so abruptly. And it makes me afraid that I won't get too many more DD Barant (setting is developed from a race studies concept called whiteness) books or Lindskold's new series on chinese mythology (the magic system makes it a kind of "hard fantasy"). Light reading for smart people tends to be endangered, and while I love Justina Robson and Ian Banks, I want some good stuff that I could just read, but still spark off some, you know? I disliked Jim Butcher's Changes, you know?

Changes was great. It had a few problems but I really liked it. I'm pretty smart and I find the insinuation that I'm not because HARD-SF doesn't appeal to me; I could care less about string theory and quantum fractals, if only I knew what they were, unfortunately I have no interest in finding out.

On topic: I agree to a certain point, when reading a sci-fi book I want to read a story rather than feel like I am reading a science text book, however authors are keenly aware that if they don't include some of the science theory for whatever they are describing then they will get criticized by those who do understand it and think the author got it wrong. Plus a little bit of good science does help me to feel like the author knows what they are talking about.

Hmm, after a glass of wine and discussion on the subject with Zakalwe ( who DIDN'T post originally, or at all...) I think I possibly did come over as very 'aw shucks I hate them intellectualls'.

I suppose I don't particularly want sci-fi dumbed down to my level. There will be times when I just want entertained, sure, and times when I'm ready for a little more. And so I guess that means there will be a lot of stuff that I am, frankly, incapable of understanding as I just don't have the basic scientific knowledge for it, let alone any knowledge of the cutting edge, (or the bleeding edge as it seems to be called now).

But as Zak said, there's a lot of cool stuff you do learn from Sci-fi that perhaps you didn't know before; like Dyson Spheres, like what the singularity is/will be, oh, I don't know, all sorts of little things like understanding the words perogee and apogee in context.

Sorry Bellis - I do kind of disagree. No, people won't learn the hard formulae, but they may glimpse the concepts behind some stuff, and even more importantly may be driven to go and find out more. though I agree on Blindsight being poorly written :P. I think this rant was mostly because I really didn't like Blindsight and was very disappointed in it.. It felt like hollywood sci-fi, not real sci-fi, despite the conceptual 'depth'.

But what I do still think is that there is an art to explaining science, that many many sci-fi writers do seem to eschew in exchange for a quickpaced, lots of technogabble story telling style. And instead of having coming away learnt things, I instead feel like an entire conversation happened over my head. So maybe it's more about the style of talking about science, rather than the content that I'm objecting too? (but after all, why should they even talk down to my level?)

ETA : Paedar, I do like Stross too. But only sometimes :P (and sometimes only for half a book...)

You really didn't come off as "aw shucks I hate them intellectualls" though my feeling is almost that Shah is angling for "aw shucks I hate them ignorant non-scientists".

Anyway. I often feel like authors are either angling to flex some superiority complex or something when they start throwing around the technobabble. Just to prove they know big words? Are on the cutting edge of "who the fuck knows what"? Does a compelling story really need technobabble, either of the "totally made it up" or the "yes this is real serious science, go wikipedia some of the long words and see if we didn't tell you so" sort, I mean really? If I want to read about the latest cutting edge whatever I'll order a few science journals and open up wikipedia thank you very much. I almost prefer the "totally made it up" sort. It's basically like magic. At least the guy put some effort into it, unless he didn't and it's just a deus ex machina or whatever. But that's just lazy writing regardless of whether the cavalry teleport in via quantum-whatsit-thingeymajig or because A Wizard Did It.

I don't care if the story is in space, or the far future, or in medieval times. A well written compelling story is not going to come into being because you threw in some science, certainly well written and compelling stories have been written that included varying levels of technobabble, and there have definitely been really good stories based around certain premises. But the addition of science or some theme or central concept wasn't what made them good. I'm perfectly happy if all the space ships are crafted from unobtanium and powered by pure Plotonium if the writing is good. And if it's bad, then any amount of exposition on how inter-galactic travel has been made possible won't save it. Let the ships be firing bullets or hyperaccelerated particles or superheated plasma or incendiary hamsters! Let them be towed through space by fucking dragons. Crew them with wizards. If there's a good story in there!

Edit!

Well, for one, there isn't very much technoBABBLE in Blindsight. What there is of it is stuff to keep the plot moving ect, ect. Having science stuff is not technobabble. Made up wholesale science stuff like what you see in Star Trek and on TV shows by JJ Abrams is technobabble.

It's technobabble if it's thrown in and thrown around, regardless of its scientific legitimacy.

Needle, I decried the attitude that I percieved in your first post. Simply that you felt entitled to say a book was bad because you didn't understand the science, almost as if the science is a flaw, when that science was a major reason it made the nomination lists.

A book should never be praised solely for containing good science unless the book is a text book, or other non fiction publication. A work of fiction should be praised because it is well written, gripping, entertaining and having other qualities which are thought to be of value in a work of literature. I also think that he is entirely entitled to say that a book is bad because you don't understand the science. Again : a work of literature is kinda by definition not a non-fiction work. If I said that I thought a science text book was bad because I'm too dumb to understand then the ball would be squarely in your court to call me a dumbass, but if a story is so reliant on scientific jargon and suchlike that it becomes either incomprehensible or unentertaining to the 99.9% of the populace without a physics PHD then I think any one of those people who didn't enjoy it are perfectly entitled to say so, and explain exactly why.

There is, in fact, a whole wide world of books to your taste and there is nothing wrong with Blindsight not being to your taste.

Certainly. But he is entitled to express why he didn't find it to his taste.

For me, I think there aren't enough books like that and especially that there aren't enough lighter books that are interesting, precisely because of such (if not quite vehement, vocal) opposition by people like you. Moreover, I think many people would enjoy such books if they didn't insist on total comprehension and nearly complete comfort from intellectual turmoil. So there are so many fewer good books written, which was the *impact* that I was describing.

I hope you can find more stuff to your hard-sf tastes. But again I don't think criticising people for not having your tastes is the way to go. I don't think people demand "total comprehension and nearly complete comfort from intellectual turmoil" though I wonder what exactly you mean by so general a turn of phrase. On the other hand I do think that people demand some concept of what the fuck is going on. I don't think pages of long very esoteric words and terminology in the place of characterisation or plot represents "intellectual turmoil" either, but represents an active attempt to disengage as large a chunk of the potential audience of the work as possible. Something that would engender intellectual turmoil in me would be something which challenged my fundamental understanding of some key concept, but I don't think throwing around the latest flavour of the month scientific theory does that in any meaningful way.

[Zoë Sumra]

Needle, I decried the attitude that I percieved in your first post. Simply that you felt entitled to say a book was bad because you didn't understand the science, almost as if the science is a flaw, when that science was a major reason it made the nomination lists. There is, in fact, a whole wide world of books to your taste and there is nothing wrong with Blindsight not being to your taste. For me, I think there aren't enough books like that and especially that there aren't enough lighter books that are interesting, precisely because of such (if not quite vehement, vocal) opposition by people like you. Moreover, I think many people would enjoy such books if they didn't insist on total comprehension and nearly complete comfort from intellectual turmoil. So there are so many fewer good books written, which was the *impact* that I was describing.

What is "bad" and what is "good"? How do you personally define these, other than "hard to understand on one extremely specific level"?

What is "intellectual turmoil"? Something specifically defined by scientific content? How do we rate a book that is difficult to grasp on the moral or philosophical level? Where should we place Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive on the "intellectual turmoil" graph? Perfectly comprehensible, but. What about Bakker and his genuine in-world female inferiority? According to him, a lot of people have trouble with that, but it wouldn't class as "intellectual turmoil" on the science ground alone, as, well, it's fantasy rather than highest-concept SF.

Who is to say that a book that a normal intelligent person cannot understand without straining is a "good book" and that a book containing fewer high concepts is, by necessity, "bad"? That sounds suspiciously close to the academic defence of literary fiction; classing a book as "good" when it focuses on linguistics at the expense of character, plot and enjoyability, and rating it as necessarily better than a book that actually is readable.

Most of all - how do we rate the ability of an author who can pack a plot full of high-concept scientific ideas but is unable to describe those concepts to the audience? Me, I'd rate that author's ability as very, very low. Someone who can think but can't write had better stick to academic papers. If I wanted to read dry concepts, I'd read an academic paper. Fiction, of any type, demands a lot more.

You like abstruse content, and, from your post, elevate that content above plot, character and readability. Fine. I personally like character interaction and believable plots, and value those factors; a book can be exquisitely written, but if the characters don't jump off the page and make the plot work, I won't like it. Do you therefore rate my taste as necessarily inferior to yours?

[MattD]

...answers the basic question I asked of how much science knowledge should be presumed by the authors.

What I find odd is the notion that there should (or even could) be a unilateral answer to this. The writing of, say, Blindsight may not have been great, but it's hard for me to imagine it improving if the equivalent of Bachelors and Doctorate coursework in biology and philosophy were shoveled wholesale into it. In other words, I think the answer to your question has to be that it depends on the particular book.

More generally, I think you're conflating several different problems. There do seem to be plenty of recent SF books that you in fact like. There are also some you do not like, but that other people do. That variety doesn't seem to me to be a problem: you get books you like, I get books I like, everybody can be happy. The real problem seems to be that you -- and me, and plenty of other people -- can't always determine which books we'll like and which we won't. That's a very different problem than the state of written SF at the moment. And while there are things we can do to ameliorate it in terms of how we choose which books to read, I don't think it's a completely solvable problem, because there are so many different kinds of readers.

In The Atrocity Archives, for example, I had no idea what an NP-complete math problem was, other than that it's one that can't currently be solved other than by brute force. I still have no idea what one is. But I never felt I needed to understand this in order to enjoy the story; I didn't need to know where the line was between fact and fiction, whereas it seems that's something you were more concerned with. On the other hand, that question is something that interested me in Blindsight, so I followed up on a couple of the notes Watts included in his Afterword. So it's not just that different stories require different levels and areas of knowledge, but that 1) different readers require different levels of understanding, which can vary from story to story, and also 2) different readers have, and/or different stories depend on, different levels of curiosity. There's neither a single baseline of knowledge nor a common set of "warning labels" that could be usefully applied to cover all this, I don't think.

As a scientist, I am sad that people are learning science from fiction, because it's usually not so much correct as it is cool.

Yes, Geoff Ryman recently edited an anthology of stories written by pairing working scientists with fiction writers, and having the writers base stories on the scientist's research. One of the interesting outcomes was seeing how often the fiction writers apparently felt they had to mess with the science in order to (presumably) make the story elements "better."

[MinDonner]

Shah, it's a shame that your extensive science education didn't include paragraph formatting, but whatever. I think it's both rude and foolish to assume that books require long and involved scientific description in order to be intellectually worthy; science does not have to be overly described in order to be accurate, and many of us find too much of this "tell, don't show" of the author's amazing research to be unnecessary and frankly boring.

[Kat]

As a scientist, I am sad that people are learning science from fiction, because it's usually not so much correct as it is cool.

I'm with Bellis on this one.

And as for hard SF, I've kind of realized that the more science I know, the less I am interested in reading hard SF because the inconsistencies annoy me, which is not the intention. Maybe it's just that I get enough science in my everyday life that I don't need to see it fictionalized as well? Not really sure. I still like hard SF, only now I prefer it as short stories rather than novel-length works. Bite-sized chunks.

ETA: It could be that my need for wildly speculating about science is sufficiently filled by getting drunk with physicists and other scientists in, "Wouldn't this be awesome?" conversations where someone can correct the bad/tweaked for increased interestingness science so I never have to see it in print.

ETA #2: Panels and blog posts also count as conversations about cool science and extending it to its logical end. But Charlie Stross actually called me too much of an anal nerd once in his blog comments, so maybe I walk the wrong side of this line.

[Werthead]

Well, see that's what appendices and footnotes are for, no? then the sciencey folk can geek out to their heart's content, yet the flow of the story doesn't get totally tangled down in scientific detail.

This reminds me of Brian Aldiss' approach to the Helliconia Trilogy. He decided to set three books on a world where the seasons last for 600 years apiece, which each book taking place centuries after the one preceding. He also decided that Helliconia needed to be nothing less then the most convincing fictional world ever created (in SF, anyway), and asked several different departments at Oxford University to assist him in creating the planet, is flauna and flora, the physics of its star system, its geography and history and so on. The amount of work by Aldiss and others poured into creating the planet was colossal, and the results compelling.

What is interesting is that the material the team generated to create this planet was enormous, but little of it is in the books. Just because Aldiss knew how the biosphere recovered from being locked in an ice age for 600 years at a time every 2,500 years or so, he felt no need to pour it into the books in massive detail. Instead, when they were reissued in omnibus he simply included a large appendix full of this material, and even then only that material needed to expand on story points.

Similarly, Hamilton created vastly more background stuff for Night's Dawn then was ever going to get in the books, so shunted a lot of the rest into The Confederation Handbook rather than putting it egregiously into the novels for no real reason.

It's a good approach.

[zakalwe7]

As a scientist, I am sad that people are learning science from fiction, because it's usually not so much correct as it is cool.

Interesting point this. Not sure that i necessarily agree. I'm an archaeologist and historian yet I'm generally pleased when people get something out of reading historical fiction or even watching historical films. However I understand your point as I know some folk who would feel the same for history, but perhaps I feel differently because I work in heritage interpretation these days. I can see some differences in the comparison, since SF can include scientific inaccuracies, but at the same time if it gets people to think, discuss and react to issues there can be a value in what is learnt.

And yes it's actually zak here, not needle posting as me. ;)

[williamjm]

1) It's your responsibility to determine if a book is something you'd like to read. Watts and Stross have well-known and well-earned reputations for hard SF that geeks out on the leading edge of science.

3) Book reviews exist not merely to guide people to what books to read, but also to help bring to light and explicate the more difficult layers of books.

Reviews may be able to help a bit in some cases, but I suspect there are plenty of reviews of The Atrocity Archives out there which wouldn't give the expectation that it would have lots of hard SF in it. Since the main premise of the series involves a secret British spy agency trying to stop Nazis unleashing Lovecraftian horrors I wouldn't blame someone for not expecting it to have a lot of technobabble in it. Stross has written a lot of non-hard-SF novels so his reputation wouldn't necessarily be a warning, especially for a novel which blatantly isn't hard-SF either.

Note Bene:

Richard Morgan is a bad idea for anything other than Takeshi Kovacs. All his other novels are at or close to Stross, Stephenson, the usual suspects levels of sophistication in one way or another.

I wouldn't really agree with this. Out of his three non-Kovacs novels, only Black Man could reasonably be described as Hard-SF (and it does a better job of explaining the science than the likes of Accelerando do), Market Forces isn't particularly high technology and doesn't focus on any scientific elements and The Steel Remains is Fantasy.

[Azmure]

Not much to add to the debate here, other than to say that I think it really depends on the individual reader and their tastes. I like the fact that there is something on the SF market to suit all tastes, and I hope that this remains the case.

And I absolutely loved Blindsight.

[Marcelo Rebelo Firqoralas]

I really wish there were more books with the level of scienctific detail found in Blindsight. It's not all that well written, true, but I found the ideas fascinating.

I have zero problem with large amounts technical and scientific detail in a book, but only if it's interesting of course. I recently read Cryptonomicon and I freaking loved it. It was both well written and contained tons of fascinating stuff about cryptography and various other stuff. I can see why not everyone would like that, but I really can't see why anyone would say that there is too much of that kind of thing, because that is simply not true.

Also, technobabble is not the same thing as excessive scientific or technical detail. It has always specifically meant the type nonsensical science/technology as you find in for instance Star Trek and it is simply wrong to try to give it a wider meaning.

[Serious Callers Only]

Hoooohoho.

LOL.

"Too much sci"

Ahahah.

[Isis]

Stirring up angsty noobs is clearly a key skill of yours, needle. I hope you have it on your CV. :lol:

I'll come back and read 'the science bit' properly later on. :P

[zakalwe7]

Wrong poster. *sigh*

[needle]

Needle, I decried the attitude that I percieved in your first post. Simply that you felt entitled to say a book was bad because you didn't understand the science, almost as if the science is a flaw, when that science was a major reason it made the nomination lists.

Ok, that is irritating. This is what I wrote :

Both have interesting premises, are not terribly written, and had me intrigued enough to slog through at least. But..the science. It's too much. Far too much.

I did not say the book was bad because of the science. I have no where said that books are bad because of the science. I've said I have a problem with too much science poorly explained in a book, but please, point me to where I said that books are bad because of my failure in understanding. Your reading comprehension and interpretation skills do not fill me with good faith in your point of view here. And I dislike being misrepresented. You are transferring your own issues on to my words, and it's really not helping the debate along.

Anyway, we have Paedar suggesting that :

I think that's why the fantasy shelves are eating into SF in the bookshops rather than the other way around -- as Chataya explains above

and matt D saying :

What I find odd is the notion that there should (or even could) be a unilateral answer to this

Well, duh. This is why we discuss things amongst many people. This is why I opened the discussion, to get other people's opinions. This is why it wasn't a freaking blog post. I'm not looking for unilateral answers, I've already shifted my own opinion a bit. Anway..

More generally, I think you're conflating several different problems. There do seem to be plenty of recent SF books that you in fact like. There are also some you do not like, but that other people do. That variety doesn't seem to me to be a problem: you get books you like, I get books I like, everybody can be happy. The real problem seems to be that you -- and me, and plenty of other people -- can't always determine which books we'll like and which we won't. That's a very different problem than the state of written SF at the moment. And while there are things we can do to ameliorate it in terms of how we choose which books to read, I don't think it's a completely solvable problem, because there are so many different kinds of readers.

and we have a couple of scientists ( Bellis and Kat) saying they don't read sci-fi because the science is too inaccurate.

Sha8 suggests that is the reader's problem ( people like me who decry the current state of the genre mean good writers aren't getting published).

For me, I think there aren't enough books like that and especially that there aren't enough lighter books that are interesting, precisely because of such (if not quite vehement, vocal) opposition by people like you

I think Paedar made an interesting point, about sci-fi not gaining enough shelf space in the book store. Matt D thinks it's not a problem, we're all going to like different stuff, and there's plenty sci-fi light out there. Sha8 thinks it's my fault :P. Chataya thinks she's never going to open a sci-fi book because she doesn't know what's going to be inside.. and Wert thinks it's because science is way more complicated these days. But I think Eloisa hit it on the head with this :

Most of all - how do we rate the ability of an author who can pack a plot full of high-concept scientific ideas but is unable to describe those concepts to the audience? Me, I'd rate that author's ability as very, very low.

Personally, I'm a bit saddened that after thirty years of reading in the genre, I might be forced to admit defeat and stop reading except for the occasional sci-fi light. Ok, that's over egging the pudding, that's not going to happen, but I do think there should be a degree of care taken by the SFF writers as a whole that they do not make the genre impenetrable to the random reader. (and the average reader does not always spend hours reading reviews to work out where an author sits on the hard/soft scifi spectrum. They wander in to a book store, take a look at the back cover, and if it appeals, buy the book).

As always, there are issues of taste, the writer's skill in expounding upon his subject, the mood the reader happens to be in when they read it, the level of knowledge the reader brings. But writing is about communicating , and if you are communicating difficult concepts, I think the onus is to a degree on the one propogating the concepts to make them legible to as wide an audience as possible. I was interested to see if there are any other like me who find it a problem now and again.

Finally, on technobabble : It's a shame if this devolves in to a thread on what that term denotes. But the way Shryke, Relic, myself and a few others have been using it has nothing to do with Star trek. Nor does the Cambridge dictionary definition :

technical language that is difficult for ordinary people to understand

Miriam Webster has 'techical jargon', Encarta has the same. Oxford has 'An informal term for the use or overuse of technical jargon'.

It may have a wider meaning in sci-fi terms, but it is not wrong to use it in the way it has been used throughout this thread.

ETA : Isis, I clearly have too much time on my hands ;p