I’m more interested in the implications of a cool idea, such as your Multi-Real, than I am in the nitty-gritty details of how it works. “What would it mean if we could do this?” is the kind of question that really fires my imagination and keeps me reading.

That’s with the caveat, btw, that the author keeps his “plausible science” internally consistent. If I find contradictions, or see an obvious way said science could be used, and yet isn’t for arbitrary story reasons, then it starts to throw me out of the story.

But honestly, that caveat is more about good story telling than iffy science.

Of course we always pull the technology out of our ass, but the trick is to make it part of a deeper world. Making the science acurate is just one way of enhancing the world building. You can create a consistent framework of magic and stick to it and that creates a big, interesting world to play in. Or you can learn the science and use that as the basis for your world building. Since I have to learn the science anyway, it’s better for me to go the hard sf route. Unfortunately that makes it tougher for me to enjoy the stories that almost get the science right. I wish the author hadn’t even tried.

I glossed over it in book 1. Wait’ll you get a load of book 2. Then everybody will have lots of excuses to dissect my science.

Thanks for participating in the discussion, Jonathan, I appreciate it.

Not really, I was just concerned that you seemed to take an off-hand remark as a reason for intellectual self-justification.

The Spinrad article does raise an interesting critical question though, namely at what point is it fair to judge a book by the quality and rigour of its ideas?

In the works of Stephen Baxter and most recently Peter Watts, there’s a real desire to engage with the cutting edge of scientific theory. If you’re reviewing books by either of these authors and you don’t get stuck into the ideas then you’re not giving the book sufficient credit.

Meanwhile, if you take a book such as Infoquake to task for its lack of detail in scientific matters then you’re also doing the book a grave disservice.

I think one of the reasons why Infoquake popped up where it did is because you did make an attempt to create a credible technology and expressed some scientific basis for your ideas when you could, as you were writing a book mainly about business, have glossed over what the characters were actually selling.

So I think, from a critics point of view, that Infoquake is a bit tricky

For the record, I don’t think that the fact that Infoquake isn’t hard SF makes it a bad book (I don’t think it’s a bad book as I said in my post). However, I do think that it means that Spinrad’s attempt to shoe-horn your book into a discussion of hard SF is a little… odd.

The word fiction is the key and any ‘hard’ science fiction looses relevancy the futher in the future it is set. The most important thing is to present the science well and convincing without being too improbable. You did a fine job in Infoquake.