There’s a running joke among Doctor Who fans concerning “reverse the polarity of the neutron flow,” a seemingly nonsensical phrase designed to sound like science without actually meaning anything.1 This is one of many more or less meaningless bits of technobabble the Doctor utilizes when they need a scienceadjacent way of solving problems, and it works just fine because there is actually precious little science in Doctor Who’s fiction.
And that’s OK! Because science fiction is a spectrum, not a box. Every sci-fistory falls somewhere on the hardsoft scale. Some stories depend on a firm understanding of actual science, while others sail along on the fumes of Clarke’s Th ird Law (“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”).2 But this range is why many writers struggle with their sci-fiworld-building—because they don’t work out a science system.3
SCIENCE = MAGIC
Writers working in the speculative genres generally agree that many fantasy stories need a magic system of some sort. Essays have been written on the subject—the rules magic systems should follow, the cheats authors can get away with, categorizing magic systems on a soft-hard scale. But while we tend to treat sci-fiand fantasy as separate genres, in terms of world-building mechanics, they’re fundamentally the
