After my debut-post disclosure that I write hard SF, you will be unsurprised to know that bad science in stories can annoy me.
It’s not that I’m looking for a Ph.D. dissertation in each story. It’s not that I limit my interests to stories that revolve around known science. What makes me testy—and, on occasion, has had me tossing a book across the room—is absurd deviations from (what should be, anyway) very basic science.
To be clear, my hobby horse is bad science, not the quantity of science, in stories. If a piece of SF illustrates a bit of science without injury to the story, that’s great—but it’s far from necessary. 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. And many an otherwise fine story bogs down in an excessive transfer of background information.
On to nanotechnology. Briefly, for those unfamiliar with the topic, nanotech deals with manufactured objects on the scale of nanometers (trillionth billionths of a meter). That’s smaller than the individual cells in the human body and bigger than atoms. The goal of nanotech is to manufacture things by precisely controlling the placement of individual atoms.
Nanotech is most definitely real—although still emerging—science. In fact, I’ve written a couple of popular-science articles on the subject. Once engineers learn to build with atomic precision, it will mean such neat things as super-strong materials (space elevator, anyone?) and really tiny machines (like a Roto-Router for the arteries).
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