Here’s something I’m looking forward to discussing at Clarion West: can accuracy actually alienate your audience? I’m listening to Anne Leckie talk about a scene in which her character stops firing a gun in a vacuum because they’re worried about it overheating. (Thread)

A reviewer contemptuously declared Leckie must “know nothing about science”, because how could a gun overheat in the cold of space? But if you know anything about space and/or heat you know this: heat dissipates as molecules carry it away. Molecules like you find in water, or air

Molecules like you DON’T find in space, because the whole point of space is there ain’t much in it. (All those SF movie scenes you saw of astronauts freezing solid in the vacuum are bunk, bee tee dubs. Bugs me every time.)

But if your audience doesn’t know - and she writes space opera, so they might not - being accurate might actually read as ‘wrong’. It’s an interesting conundrum! I’ve run into it myself with something far more mundane.

I had to write a character being hit in the leg by a ricocheting bullet. It’s dark and the shot isn’t deliberate, and she’s running at the time. Having never been shot, I dug up as many firsthand accounts of shootings with a similar calibre and distance as possible, for research.

What cropped up again and again is that when people are unexpectedly shot that way and haven’t seen the gun, /they often don’t realise they’ve been shot/. They feel a sharp blow, but it often takes them looking at the injury to realise what has happened to them.

I have been ‘corrected’ on that scene at least four times. I’m legitimately considering rewriting it to be wrong so that people think it’s right.