Get the details right. A retired professional programmer with an MFA explains how to make your story details about computers and software be as solid as your physics. You don’t need a EE degree, but you can use my help.
Are you a science-fiction writer? Do your characters interact with computers? Maybe you have characters that ARE computers? Any electronic communication in your stories? Then this blog is for you.
Why do I write the CompSciFi blog?
I’m a life-long fan of speculative fiction, and spent nearly as long working as a software guy (with five patents and four academic papers). The combination makes me one of Those People, who get annoyed with and sometimes complain about technical boo-boos in the fiction they love most. You already know to call your physics buddy to help work out orbital mechanics; now you have a resource to keep computers and especially computer programs from doing foolish and improbable things in your fiction.
No, really, why?
Science fiction writers generally acknowledge that in their genre, it is important to get the science right. Or, if you’re stepping outside what questions science currently has decent answers for, then you should at least make it plausible.
People vary in how serious they are at getting it right, and fans tend to label the most serious as “hard SF” writers. We’re talking people like Hal Clement, Robert L. Forward, Geoffrey Landis… people with day jobs as actual scientists and science educators. Then you get people who aren’t quite at that level of hardness, but still take the task seriously, like John Scalzi. I admire these people and enjoy reading their work.
What kinds of science do they take seriously? Physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, all the so-called “hard” sciences. Many also take softer sciences just as seriously: economics, sociology, psychology, even politics, history, anthropology. Historians in particular have been doing a great job of writing excellent stories with well-developed backgrounds: Harry Turtledove, Arkady Martine, P. Djèlí Clark.
Computers… not so much.
There are only two writers I’m aware of whom I’ve thought really got it as far as computers and software were concerned. One is James P. Hogan, who did a number of great high-tech adventures, often involving computer and engineering professionals; sadly he became infatuated with Velikovsky in his later years. The other is the relatively obscure Rick Cook, who wrote a few novels featuring a software hacker portaled into a fantasy world where he became a revolutionary, inventing a programming language for magic.
On the flip side, there’s one that really got my goat. This was a set of stories that appeared in Analog in 1984, later published as the novel Valentina: Soul in Sapphire, by Joseph H. Delaney and Marc Stiegler. This one offended me so much that I actually proposed and ran a session at the 1985 Readercon, which they lamely titled “Computer Science Errors in Science Fiction.” (I wanted to call it “Computer Non-Science.”) (In 2025 I found an old copy of the paperback and started reading it again, to make sure my aging memory wasn’t playing tricks on me; nope, it was just as implausible as I remembered.)
That sparked the idea of doing a chapbook (the Internet as we know it today barely existed then), but then I got married, had two kids, yada yada. Well, now I’m retired and I don’t have any more excuses to put it off. In the meantime, technology has advanced, so here we are: Welcome to the CompSciFi blog!