Top 17 Edward M. Lerner Quotes

History buffs expect historical background in historical fiction. Mystery readers expect forensics and police procedure in crime fiction. Westerns – gasp – describe the West. Techno-thriller readers expect to learn something about technology from their fiction.

Many a fine SF story uses science or technology merely as backdrop. Many a fine SF story presumes a technological breakthrough and explores its implications without attempting to predict how the thing might actual work.

Too much detail can bog down any story. Enough with the history of gunpowder, the geology of Hawaii, the processes of whaling, and cactus and tumbleweed.

Authors like reading. Go figure. So it’s not surprising that we sometimes bog down in the research stage of new writing projects.

The challenge – and much of the fun – of writing in an established future history lies in incorporating new knowledge while remaining true to what has gone before. Expanding and enriching, not contradicting.

Readers and viewers will differ about what’s totally standalone, what’s totally serially dependent, and what’s merely enriched by reading/viewing in a particular order.

Some books are serials, not to be mistaken for anything else. ‘The Two Towers,’ for example, ought never to be read in isolation.

I want to believe humanity has not forgotten how to explore.

Anything that can unambiguously represent two values – while resisting, just a wee bit, randomly flipping from the state you want retained into the opposite state – can encode binary data.

I have to believe SF writers will continue to inspire the public to have faith in – to demand! – a future that is at least as big and bold as the past.

Time travel offends our sense of cause and effect – but maybe the universe doesn’t insist on cause and effect.

Happily, researchphilia is not the problem it once was. The Internet makes just-in-time research very practical.

Lots of science fiction deals with distant times and places. Intrepid prospectors in the Asteroid Belt. Interstellar epics. Galactic empires. Trips to the remote past or future.

What SF author or fan isn’t interested in human space travel? I’ve yet to meet one.

One of the bedrock principles of physics is the conservation of energy. In this universe, energy can be neither created nor destroyed.

I like to think readers appreciate a well-drawn near-future as well as a well-drawn far-future.

The distinguishing characteristic of the techno-thriller is technical detail.