Our service providing science help for writers

Your novel, novella, short story or epic poem has everything:

• Ingenious plot
• Scintillating dialogue
• Believable and interesting characters

Shouldn’t you also get the universe right?

Of course if you’re writing historical novels you take care to get the details correct. And if you write science fiction you know you need a knowledge of science, so that some reader won’t say, “Ha! Red dwarf stars never explode as novae!” But shouldn’t you get even your everyday universe right?

Well, you may not need to. If your writing is as good as, say, Hemingway or J. P. Rowling you can put the wrong stars in the sky. You’ll get a condescending mention in beginning astronomy textbooks, but that’s survivable.

Still, there’s the playwright (or translator) who has Wallenstein looking at Saturn in the constellation Cassiopeia. It never gets there. That may not change the story. But someone in the audience will remember an undergraduate astronomy class; and it shows the author describing, in detail, something he clearly knows nothing about. That—may not be survivable.

So getting the science right applies not only science fiction, but to other genres as well. You wouldn’t allow six-shooters in a story about Louis XVI, would you? You should take care of the sky also.

And it’s not hard! We cover

• Observational astronomy: what your characters see in the sky
• Astronomy, physics and chemistry for your science fiction story (including Special and General Relativity, which are easy to make mistakes in if you don’t do the math)
• The laws of nature for any genre
• Ships, weather and climate

(See our about us page for our consultants’ backgrounds.)

Here’s how it works:

You contact us (see the contact page) with your particular needs. Maybe you have a specific question (“Can liquid sodium exist in space?”), or simply need a story vetted for proper science. In the second case we’ll tell you

• Yes, it’s quite doable
• No, you’ve broken or misunderstood the laws of physics, so you’ll have to find another way
• Maybe (we don’t see any reason why it can’t happen, but neither do we see how it could)

–with as much explanation as necessary.

Let us help you get the universe right, so your audience can keep their disbelief comfortably suspended.