The marine biologist hauled himself onto the shore, his air tanks spent, the assassin close behind. Immediately the biologist stripped out of his heavy equipment and grabbed his dive knife. He couldn’t believe it. He’d finally cracked the mysterious language of Linear A and found the location of the ancient sunken city. Now he just had to make it back to his team alive.
The sound of scratching beside him caused him to snap his head down, spying a leatherback turtle, the largest amphibian on the island, crawling across the sand to return to the water.
Were you going along with the story until that last bit, and then were pulled out of the narrative?
We can believe that a marine biologist was somehow able to crack Linear A, a language that has utterly confounded scholars. We can believe that he found a lost civilization, and is ready to knife fight an assassin. But a turtle is a reptile, gosh darn it, not an amphibian. We are distracted and pulled out of the narrative.
Putting fact in your fiction is a funny thing. Readers may be able to believe all kinds of fanciful notions, magic, and inventions of plot, but make a factual error with things they are familiar with, like calling a turtle an amphibian, and that suspension of disbelief is disrupted.
I read a lot of science thrillers and the onus to be accurate is especially heavy there. You can create a plot with explosions, acrobatic assassins that speak twelve languages, lost civilizations, hidden treasures, and ancient tomes, and the audience will drink it in. But make a factual error, like that Plato wrote those ancient tomes in Italian, and the reader can grind to a halt and be taken right out of the narrative. Make enough of these mistakes and the reader might not finish the book. They might even avoid your next one.
I vividly remember my first experience with this. I was happily reading a thriller that described how bubbles of air from Earth’s ancient atmosphere can get trapped in ice. Scientists then extract ice cores and can analyze those bubbles. “True, true,” I nodded, fascinated. I’ve long studied paleoclimatology, and knew that, for instance, the ash that buried the Minoan colony on Santorini in 1623 B.C.E. was found in a bubble of air from an ice core extracted in Greenland. I felt charged up as the novel progressed, as the scientist characters leaned over their own ice core, taking samples. And then boom, there it was—the author stated that the ice being sampled by these scientists was 350 million years old. I lowered the book. The oldest ice on earth is around two million years. Now maybe just a handful of readers would know this, but I couldn’t help think that if this was my novel I’d written, there’d be some eminent glaciologist out there who had happily picked up my book only to set it down with disgust when she got to that part.
So when I started incorporating a lot of science into my own work, I knew it had to be accurate.
A few years ago, I was accepted to attend Launchpad, a writer workshop that was funded by NASA at the time. Its aim was to encourage accurate science in fiction. Twelve writers were put up at the University of Wyoming. During the day, we listened to lectures on astronomy and spectroscopy. At night we gazed through telescopes and discussed movies we all loved but that had gotten the science completely wrong. During that amazing time, we learned how to calculate escape velocity, pull off slingshot maneuvers, and what really happens when you’re sucked out of an airlock.
I later went on to write a trilogy, The Skyfire Saga, and knew I had to get all the climatology and astronomy right. I used accurate models to predict the disastrous changes that anthropogenic climate change will wreak in the near future if left unchecked. Sea level rise, atmospheric CO2 concentrations, methane—it all had to be precise.
And now with my upcoming thriller, A Solitude of Wolverines, I wanted to bring this same ethic to the narrative. The book features a wildlife biologist who lands a gig studying wolverines on a remote sanctuary in Montana. I didn’t want a wolverine researcher to pick up my book and end up scoffing at inaccuracies with the research methods I described therein.
So I read countless academic papers on wolverine field methods, and devoured every nonfiction article and book I could find on these amazing creatures. On foot, I explored the areas where they live so I would know the right trees and flowers to include, and get the scent of the air just right. I was even lucky enough to see a wolverine on two separate occasions, which was a treat indeed, as they are exceedingly rare. Only 300 remain in the contiguous U.S.
I do wildlife research myself, but the research methods for each species are often as unique as the species themselves, so I really wanted to delve into the specific techniques developed by wolverine researchers.
Wolverines are incredibly elusive and live in remote areas of treacherous, steep terrain at high elevations. Researchers spend a lot of time out on skis, on snowshoes, and in helicopters tracking them. They set up remote cameras and bait stations in the hopes of photographing their rare quarry. They implant tracking devices and use VHF antennas to record wolverine movements and ranges.
But my goal of bringing accurate science to my fiction wasn’t just to prevent wildlife biologists from putting my book down in disenchantment due to mistakes in the science. Here was a species that the average person knows very little about, and I wanted to shed light on the plight these creatures face. Because I wanted to inform as well as thrill with A Solitude of Wolverines, I had to get the facts right about wolverine lifestyles, ranges, diets, and temperaments. I wanted readers to fall in love with these hardy creatures, to learn about their unique existences. For instance, wolverine fathers will spend time with their kits as they grow up, showing them the ropes of the forest, and how and where to forage for food. Paternal care is incredibly rare behavior for carnivores.
Being accurate is especially important if new readers are attracted to your book because of the subject matter. Perhaps they read a lot of non-fiction on the subject, be it archaeology, climatology, or wildlife biology. It’s a great opportunity to entertain new readers, but that opportunity can be lost if inaccuracies make them abandon the book.
But if you pull off a thrilling, accurate novel on a subject, readers will be particularly enthusiastic about recommending your book to others and will keep a lookout for your next one.
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