Why an SF Writer Still
Reads Research Papers

Misconceptions About an SF Writer Who Majored in Chemistry

The author biography in several of my published books begins with the sentence, “Majored in chemistry and writes SF.” It is a remnant of my early days as a writer, when I had so few credentials to my name that I felt compelled to mention my major. Yet this short, straightforward phrase often prompts all sorts of questions.
For instance, the questions I hear most often when people learn that I majored in chemistry are, “Can you make bombs?” and “Can you make drugs?” The latter may have something to do with the popularity of Breaking Bad, a television series about a brilliant high school chemistry teacher who turns to manufacturing drugs for the sake of his family. In any case, the answer to both questions is no.
I was never particularly confident when it came to chemical synthesis. The same is true of the phrase “writes SF.” Whenever I attend events under the title of SF writer, I am invariably asked, “Do you have to major in science to write SF?” or “Does specialized knowledge help?” Again, the answer is no. Many of the SF writers I know did not study science or engineering, and most of the specialized knowledge I once memorized has long since faded from memory in the years since I left the laboratory.
After all, the F in SF stands for fiction. No matter how much scientific knowledge you accumulate, SF is not complete until you weave it into an exciting story.
The craft of storytelling must be honed through practice. So, if you want to become an SF writer, the best thing you can do is read a great deal of SF and write as much as possible.
Does this mean the time I spent studying science was completely useless for SF writing? Of course not. Because science fiction draws heavily on real-world science and technology, people who are already familiar with those fields may find the genre easier to approach. In my case, even my brief experience working in a laboratory proved useful. Drawing on those memories helped me create convincing scenes involving scientists and laboratories.
Yet the most useful thing I learned during my undergraduate and graduate studies was something else entirely: how to find and read scientific papers.

How Research Papers Make the Impossible Believable

Fascinating scientific ideas that might inspire a science fiction story can readily be found in popular science books or online, and that level of research is often enough to write an entire story. Sometimes, however, you need to dig deeper.
This is because plausibility is essential to science fiction.
Although the imagination of science fiction is rooted in real science and technology, it does not remain confined to them.
It may venture into technologies that cannot yet be realized, forms of life never found on Earth, or even entirely different laws of physics.
The job of an SF writer is to portray such unfamiliar and sometimes preposterous elements as though they were possible—as though they were scientific— even while knowing full well that they make no sense.
For example, the title story of my first short story collection, Proven Facts, is based on the premise that the existence of the soul has already been scientifically proven.
I do not believe in souls, but in the story I wanted to explore how a soul might be studied in physical terms if it did exist.
The short story Wizard Etiol’s True Ending Quest, included in the hard SF anthology Love, Revolution, and Quest, goes a step further.
It is both a medical mystery in which the protagonist, transported into the body of a wizard character in a classic RPG, investigates the cause of the tragic fate awaiting their companions, and a work of hard SF that places particular emphasis on scientific plausibility.
In other words, readers must be able to believe in a medical diagnosis taking place inside a fantasy game.
The tool I chose to solve this tricky task was the citation of scientific papers.
Even the most outlandish idea can appear surprisingly convincing when the reader is told that it is based on actual research.
Most importantly, I knew where to find scientific papers and how to read them.
Knowing how to search for and download a relevant paper, how to read the abstract and conclusion first to grasp its overall argument, and how to make a rough judgment about its reliability are all skills that are difficult to acquire without being taught.
Fortunately, I had learned all of them at school. As a result, I could draw on an abundance of research capable of lending plausibility to my fiction, ranging from the progression of various prion diseases¹ and the origins of the transmissible facial cancer found in Tasmanian devils² to the bold evolutionary hypothesis that cancer cells in cnidarians may have evolved into a new species.³
That knowledge allowed me to write a story that could credibly be presented as hard SF, even alongside the works of the anthology’s distinguished contributors.

The Stories Made Possible by Seemingly Minor Research

Of course, those studies were not conducted to help a Korean SF writer meet a manuscript deadlines, nor does GIST exist to train writers like me.
However, if someone were to ask what possible benefit there could be in researching a rare genetic disorder found in only 70 families, a cancer that affects only a particular marsupial in Tasmania, or the origins of a microscopic invertebrate, I could answer with confidence.
Just as there are stories I could not have written without learning how to read scientific papers and experiencing laboratory life at GIST, there are stories I could not have completed without those seemingly minor studies.
Some forms of imagination became possible only because researchers around the world expanded the frontiers of human knowledge, one small step at a time.
That may not have been the primary purpose of the research, but it is unquestionably one of its benefits.
Those within the scientific community already understand why society must invest heavily in basic science that produces no immediate financial return.
But as someone who writes science fiction at the margins of the scientific world, I experience the importance of basic science as a source of immediate added value more directly than I do through the conventional argument that no one knows when, or how substantially, today’s research will pay off.
Whenever scientists learn even a little more about the world, the realm of imagination open to humanity expands by the same measure.
Within that expanded realm, one person may conceive a topic for further research, another may discover an answer, and still another may find the subject of their next science fiction story.
SF writers can generally turn imagination into a finished work a little faster than scientists can.
That is why, even today, I find myself reading a paper on the peculiar mating habits of a certain cockroach species found in Southeast Asia.⁴
I read it to create a small amount of added value—unrelated to whatever immense value the paper may someday generate, but certain to be fascinating in its own right.