This past Saturday, I was fortunate
enough to be back down in D.C. for the USA Science and
Engineering Festival. When my parents first brought it up, I was reluctant
to go. I thought it sounded, well, boring, and if I was going to be back in
NoVa, I felt that I'd much rather spend the time with my friends. But one thing
led to another, and Saturday morning I found myself walking through the doors
of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center to see what there was to see.
And, if you couldn't guess from the
first sentence of this post, I had a lot
of fun.
It's easy for me- and others too, I
think- to say "I'm a fantasy writer. I use words and imagination.
I tell stories. I'm bad at math and science, I don't like them, and I
personally don't need to learn about them. After all, why would I ever need to
know this stuff? I make up my own worlds and they run by my rules."
And maybe that's true. I highly
doubt I'll ever need to know how to integrate powers of sin and cos, or
identify the organs in an earthworm, or calculate the energy needed to push a
block up an ideal plane, in order to write my novels.
But, on a larger scale, I'd argue
that writers need to know about science far more than a lot of us would like to
admit.
At the Science and Engineering
Festival, I learned how a polarizing filter worked and how that same polarizing
filter, layers of plastic and tape, and a light source can create art. I
discovered memory alloys and ferrofluids. I saw more robots of various shapes,
sizes, and types than I knew existed and watched a demonstration of Lockheed
Martin’s Fortis “exoskeleton” that supplements the strength, endurance, and
productivity of shipyard workers. I walked through exhibits that promised this
generation would see a Mars colony.
I enjoyed just about every minute
of it- and not just because I got an awful lot of story-pieces.
Science can be boring. I don’t love
it- which is why I’m not basing my career on it. But just because I don’t love
it the way I love words doesn’t mean I don’t like it. When done right, learning about how this world works is as
fascinating as any book. And why shouldn’t it be? For all the imagination and
creativity a writer might put in to making her own book world, it’s only a
fraction of what God put in to creating our
world for us to discover and enjoy.
And that’s part of why writers-
even fantasy writers; especially
fantasy writers- should learn about science, even if it doesn’t seem useful at
the time. We study the work of great writer-worldbuilders like Tolkien and
Sanderson to discover their secrets. Why shouldn’t we also study the work of
the greatest Author and World-Creator,
and study it even more carefully than we do the lesser ones? By discovering how
this world works, we can better build our fantasy realms; by knowing the rules
here, we know how to break them- or not break them- elsewhere.
I’m not saying you need a science
degree in order to write. I’m not saying that if you dislike science, you’ll be
a bad writer. But I am saying that science is worth learning and worth enjoying. I, for one, plan to do both.
What do you think? Do you like
science? Dislike it? Do you think a good writer needs to learn about science as
well as how to use words? Please tell me in the comments!
Thanks for reading!
-Sarah (Leilani Sunblade)
