"You're All Just Writing Fantasy!"

"You're all just writing fantasy!" said one of the members of my writer's group last night. She said this, slightly frustrated, because I was trying to come up with a "realistic" force-field / anti-meteor shield to protect my ships which were running around at a significant fraction of the speed of light. Needless to say, she didn't feel that I needed to sweat those details.

I countered with John Scalzi's flying snowman theorem, which is the idea that, for every person, they have a different "thing" which is a Bridge Too Far on the Road of Suspension of Disbelief. (In Mrs. Scalzi's case, this was when Frosty the Snowman took to the air.) John's point was that, in the context of the story, flying made sense.

My point was (and is) that in the context of my story, in which I am trying to be as scientifically accurate as possible, a "realistic" anti-meteor shield made sense. Now, I suspect that many of the readers of the story won't give a flying fig about the force field. A few will, including me. And since at the moment nobody's paying me for the story, my voice is the one that counts.

Thus endeth the sermon...