by Marlee Baldridge
Readers don’t always care about the finer details of orbital mechanics in deep space mining or the geophysics of a climate dystopia story, but they do care about richly textured worlds that feel real and present. Fact-checking is an opportunity to build a complex world where the reader truly feels like a member of a mining crew or a resident of a frigid snowball planet.
While Google Scholar can do a lot of heavy-lifting, it doesn’t always answer the specific question that can trouble a narrative. What kind of outer shielding is needed for a ship to break orbit? Why are octopus eyes like that?
Maybe you don’t need a chemistry consultant. Maybe you only have one or two items you’d like cleared up, and Google Scholar is getting you nowhere.
For specific questions, it’s often best to go straight to the source: the scientists. In this article, I spoke with two scientists who work directly with the public.
Getting Inspiration
This might mean consulting trade publications or following interesting persons on social media. Professional conferences are another great resource. For example, the American Geophysical Union’s session notes are a treasure trove of both good story ideas and scientists who have made a point of doing outreach.
There are also public meetings for city and county-level decision-making that involve scientists such as Margaret Garcia, PhD. Dr. Garcia is an associate professor at Arizona State University and serves on a local board involved with water and wastewater management. “So you can listen in on what the conversation is about: water resources, planning, considerations on different investments…”
Dr. Garcia added that while climate tipping points are a popular idea in media (and important), “there are social and government tipping points as well. And those can be interrelated.” At this point in the interview, the lights in her office turned off. Garcia backed up from our Zoom call, arms wide, to trigger the motion sensors and turn the office lights on again. “Sorry, we have a very energy-efficient building!”
Small, familiar elements of everyday life can find their way into a fantastic story. How would a hyper-energy-efficient building affect a Zoom call between protagonists trying to decide the fate of the planet?
How to Find Scientists
Scientists are professionals who are in love with hyper-specific topics they are rarely asked about. Don’t be afraid to!
“Most people are super open about it and would love to be contacted, but writers actually do not do it that often,” Helena Hartmann, PhD, said in an email. She is a postdoc at the University Hospital Essen and works in Psychology with a focus in Biological and Clinical Psychology.
“It’s within the scope of our role as professors to work with community members around the science or scholarly work that we do,” said Dr. Garcia, who works within the School for Sustainable Engineering and Built Environment at ASU. A professor at a local university, especially a public university, will be much more likely to help than perhaps a researcher in an industry that might have proprietary or management concerns.
Scientists can usually be found on social media, via the email listed on their published papers (that’s why it’s listed, so they can be contacted by interested parties), or through their departmental email if they’re with a university. Try this before a phone call—not everyone has a voicemail set up.
How to Ask for Their Help
Like any professional email, start with expectations and deadlines. Even giving a scientist a deadline a month or two in the future helps demonstrate a respect for their time. Don’t include the questions upfront—that might read as taking their time for granted—but do include the specific subject matter you’re interested in.
“I generally like this kind of informal outreach, but it should still stay professional,” Dr. Hartmann said. “I sometimes get very generic emails with a few questions and the deadline of tomorrow for an article—that is not very nice or considerate of people’s time.”
Asking about availability for the next month, however, is much more approachable.
What to Ask
Once expectations are set, now you can get into the nitty-gritty of your question:
● Start with the basics. What is the specific goal of this mechanism you have questions about? “In this scene, the protagonist is in deep space, surrounded by fog after a weird space event. I want to build an atmosphere of suspense and mystery.”
● What part of the mechanism are you having trouble with? “Space is a vacuum, though, right? So can there be fog in a vacuum? Isn’t it supposed to be really cold?”
The purpose of this is to be as concise as possible while also giving the scientist enough material to suggest changes. They might say, “The phase-change for water would have happened much earlier at 2.7K, so it would probably be ice-crystals forming over the protagonist’s visor. Alternatively, it might not be water. Helium or hydrogen remain gaseous at extremely low temperatures. There’s also lots of dust in space, could the fog be dust?”
Suddenly the protagonist is floating through the debris of a destroyed moon, not just water vapor. Doesn’t that make the scene all the more ominous?
How to Credit a Scientist
These scientists aren’t being paid for helping you, and this should factor into asking for assistance. For academics, there is what’s called a “service burden” that especially applies to women and people of color. For industry professionals, they may be sacrificing important crunch time in research to help clear up a few world-building problems.
Crediting the scientist in the acknowledgements of your book is an obvious first step. An author can also credit them on social media in any promotion that happens from a published book.
And One Last Thing
Scientists aren’t always in consensus. One example is the Anthropocene. Everyone is pretty sure it started immediately after the Industrial Revolution. However, there’s also a group of paleoclimatologists that argue it started closer to the 1500s, shortly after the mass-genocide of Indigenous people of the Americas, when previously agrarian land became reforested and (though this is unlikely) influenced the Little Ice Age.
Another important note is that this advice isn’t one hundred percent accurate either. Scientists are people, and people have different opinions on how to be solicited for help. So when in doubt, just ask!
Explore more articles from Wring from Science
Marlee Baldridge is a science communicator based in the Midwest. She’s written for NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, an NSF grant, and Ames National Laboratory. Learn more at marleebaldridge.com.