: Re: How do sci-fi stories hold up if their premise or details become discredited? I've been playing with the idea of writing a sci-fi story that would resemble those written roughly 50-100 years

@Annie587

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All fiction is about the suspension of disbelief. Decades ago I read a statement that sticks in my mind to this day. A writer discussing science fiction said that he had an easier time believing that it is possible to travel faster than light than he did believing that Perry Mason only gets big murder cases with innocent clients and always wins.

A good writer sucks you into the story, so that you almost, sort of, believe that this is real. Did you ever read one of those stories that end, "And then I woke up. It had all been a dream." 99% of the time I feel cheated. I was trying to pretend that this was real, and now the writer pulls the rug out from under me and says it's not. Or a more extreme case, I saw a movie once that ended with the camera pulling back to show the movie lights and the edges of the set and so forth, and we hear the director say, "That's a wrap!" I found this to be a very annoying ending. The producers broke the contract with the viewers. Yes, I know that this is just a movie, it's not real. But I'm trying to pretend that it's real, and then you shove it in my face that it's not.

Of course sometimes writers fail at sucking us into the story. They put in something that is so glaringly unbelievable that the reader just can't accept it. I'm sure we've all had times when we were reading a book or watching a movie and we say, "Oh, come on! There's no way this ordinary mild-mannered office worker could suddenly single-handed take on three trained, experienced killers." Or, "How stupid could that woman possibly be that she would agree to meet someone alone in a deserted warehouse that she KNOWS is a serial killer?"

Science fiction stories set in the future have the built-in problem that it is very unlikely that the author will extrapolate future technology exactly correctly. When I'm reading science fiction written decades ago, I often come across examples of bad predictions like that. Like, just a few months ago I re-read Asimov's "Caves of Steel", set hundreds of years in the future, and there's a point in the story where the detective gets an important clue by studying the chemical film used to take a picture. Asimov never guessed that long before the time when his story was set, chemical film would be replaced by digital photography. I found it a little jarring, but it was generally a well-written story, so I just glossed over it and moved on. It was like hitting a pot hole when driving. Yes, it's annoying and distracting, but it doesn't normally ruin your trip.

If a story is generally well-written, you ignore little flaws and move on. If the whole story is filled with absurd technical gaffes, unbelievable characters, and so on, at some point it collapses and you throw the book away.

As others have pointed out here, some fantasy stories are set in an alternate reality where things are different with no pretense of relating them to the real world. When I read a fantasy store where the wizard casts magic spells, I don't say, "Oh come on, how would just waving your hands and saying a few words in Latin make that happen?!" I just accept that as the premise of the story. Sometimes I read a fantasy story and I find it frustrating because the premise is not well developed or explained. Like I'll find myself saying, "How come in chapter 1 the wizard had the power to destroy a city, but now in chapter 3 he's captured by this small squad of soldiers and locked in a cell? Couldn't he have cast some spell to kill all the soldiers? If he could destroy a city why can't he magically knock down the walls of a cell?" Etc. Maybe the author has some idea of how magic works in this world that makes it all logical and consistent but he failed to explain it. Or maybe he's just making things up as he goes along as necessary to make the plot move in the direction he wants. That's where my suspension of disbelief fails in fantasy stories.

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