What counts as 'plausible?' I've got a reputation for writing 'hard' science fiction, with rigorously worked-out and plausible ideas--but I can tell you right now that I've never written an SF novel that didn't hinge crucially on at least one utterly preposterous and impossible idea. Ventus? --Faster than light travel. Permanence? --Same. Lady of Mazes? ( ...Mmph, I'll get back to you on that one... maybe I wrote one...) Sun of Suns? --A 'technology suppression field.' Listen, anyone with a microgram of rhetorical talent can make anything sound plausible (a fact that explains nearly everything about the Predicament of Mankind); it's all in how you present it. Jay Lake's got a whole universe built as a vast Victorian clockwork mechanism, and I buy that. China Mieville does a wicked satire on Hegelian philosophy in Perdido Street Station, a kind of intellectual drive-by shooting, but I haven't heard anyone complaining about the 'plausibility' of crisis theory.
Of course, the flipside of all this is something that Nietzsche pointed out and that far too few people consider: "Just because an argument is convincing, that doesn't mean it's right. It's merely convincing." Judging some SF as 'better' because it's more 'plausible' is as foolish an exercise as believing seven impossible things before breakfast.
Here's my rule: am I having fun? Yes? Then I'll keep reading
Et voici la réponse de Peter Watts, auteur, entre autres, de Vision aveugle :
Pour plus de détails , c'est iciI'd argue that scientific plausibility is vastly overrated -- and speaking as someone whose novels have actually been used as core texts in both science and philosophy courses, I should really be a poster boy for the anal-retentive science-huggers in the crowd.
The fact is, though, that the state of scientific knowledge itself changes daily. Twenty years ago, the concept of "dark energy" was fantasy. Today we've got leading physicists admitting at least the possibility of time travel. To slavishly adhere to what we "know" to be true today is to claim that we've already pinned down the fundamentals, that there are no paradigms left to shift -- and that's one of the most profoundly antiscientific sentiments I can imagine.
But beyond that philosophical stance, there's the more intimate fact that the plausibility of any given piece of SF is more a function of the reader than of the work being read. Larry Niven's stuff is frequently cited as a good example of Hard-SF -- it certainly rocked my world back in high school -- but anyone who knows the first thing about molecular genetics knows that aliens devolving into humans, genes that code for luck, are the stuff of pure fantasy. Somewhat further along the scale, I'm constantly trying to cover my ass against all those ferret-faced nitpickers I left behind in academia. I've flailed around for pages at a time, trying to explain how a fictitious doomsday germ might subvert signal molecules on the cytoplasmic side of a host-cell vesicle so that the vesicles avoid fusion with lysosomes -- and while my handwaving would pass muster with a high school grad or even an undergrad, it would be every bit as implausible as Niven's to a professional microbiologist.
But you know what? In either case, it doesn't fucking matter. Science fiction is not about "facts" any more than science is (and science isn't about facts any more than a house is "about" bricks). Science is a process. What's important isn't so much that you adhere to facts as to principles. Given the "impossible" premise of an ftl drive or spacing-guild navigators that trip out on Space Mescal to steer between the stars, does the story explore the consequences of that conceit in a way that makes sense?
And that's why I continue to have a soft spot for Niven after all these years; he didn't just predict the automobile, he predicted the traffic jam (to paraphrase a famous line I've seen attributed to at least three different people). Transplant technology strengthens the death penalty; teleportation between different latitudes unbalances an object's energy budget; aliens, while frequently wrong in the details, are clearly designed with the process of Darwinian evolution front and center.
So if someone writes a story in which the hero's house is built of upsydaisium, you're not going to score any critiquing points with me by pointing out that upsydasium doesn't exist. Science fiction isn't here to say This is true or This will happen: it's here to say Suppose it did: then what? Those of us who insist on conforming to today's paradigms and no others (The Mundanistas come to mind) are welcome to do so.
Personally, though, I think they should lighten up