: Re: When writing science fiction, how important is it to provide scientific details for the (fictitious) things you are presenting in the story? I know there is a difference between 'hard' and 'soft'

@Rambettina586

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Just to add to the other (very good) answers, it's worth pointing out that if your story is from the point of view of an inhabitant of that world, they might not know how a lot of things work.

Imagine a contemporary novel, where someone rides an travellator (a horizontal "escalator"), something that might seem magical to someone from the 18th century. Does our protagonist know how a travellator works? Probably not. They could have a guess perhaps. But, either way, the novelist doesn't feel the need to explain how it works.

In addition, if the technology is not well understood by you, the writer (which is inevitable if you're talking about something like wormholes, where nobody really knows how they might work, even their "inventor" Kip Thorne), then the more details you give, the more there is to pick apart and find flaws. If you just say "Sven took the Cannula and was on Tranquility base within minutes" then the reader's imagination has to do more work.

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