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The Challenge of Plausibility in Writing
When it comes to science fiction, for example, plausibility is an interesting question.
For the most part, the fiction I write is in one of three genres. Fantasy, science fiction, and Steampunk.
When it comes to fantasy, I get to make shit up. The worlds you create can operate with nary a thought towards certain scientific laws. What’s more, you can have fantastical creatures, other humanoids, and powers that don’t exist in our world and need ZERO plausibility (save connecting to your reader and their invested suspension of disbelief).
With Steampunk, it’s largely about the aesthetic. Gears, steam-powered contraptions based on ideas of a bygone age, and steam-powered engines. Some give this a fantasy element with whole new worlds (which has been my approach) while others do an alternate history — giving the Victorian era incredible technologies they didn’t have. It is, however, a relatively niche idea.
Then you get to science fiction. This is not a single, wholly united genre either. For example, you get ideas of sci-fi that are fairly plausible like Andy Weir’s The Martian and Artemis or James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse series (ignoring the protomolecule). Then, you get slightly less plausible ideas like Star Trek, Babylon 5, and Firefly.
