A post at Archon: Is Accuracy Overrated?  Join us for a debate on the value of realism vs. narrative.

My first impulse is to say: Accuracy is irrelevant.

My second thought is: Well, not every kind of accuracy. Just some kinds of accuracy.

My third thought is: Fine, what are the types of accuracy anyway?

A) FTL, telepathy, werewolves, etc.

It doesn’t matter whether this giant and important trope is realistic.

No one cares about conservation of mass when your cute little Chihuahua shifts shape into a giant slavering hellhound. If someone tells you this violates conservation of mass, you’re justified in giving them a long look and asking whether they think shapeshifting Chihuahuas actually exist in the real world and that’s why they’re bringing this up? Do they think you’re being inaccurate in your depiction of this category of nonexistent magical doggy? Would they care to explain in small words why physics is relevant with regard to nonexistent magical pets?

I very specifically rejected “realism” when I wrote the Black Dog books with regard to the very! typical! trope that says when a werewolf shifts from wolf or monster form to human, he should be naked because his clothes were ripped to shreds when he shifted. This trope makes me roll my eyes. Shifting from human to some other form is magic. Shifting back is magic. There is no need to have clothing be destroyed or discarded during the shift because this is magic. If you want to put your characters into embarrassing situations, fine, but if you don’t want to throw this additional obstacle into their way, then there’s not the slightest need to do so. Patricia Briggs made this rather pointed by having ONE werewolf who is able to shift without losing or ruining clothing. Because magic!

Pern wouldn’t have been improved by worrying about the square-cube law and saying, “But those dragons are far too big to fly.” Yes, reader, they’re far too big to fly, and that’s why I say the Pern books are fantasy disguised as SF (that is, science fantasy). Now shut up about the square-cube law and enjoy the story. Sharon Shinn’s angels are in this category too. All FTL and wormholes in space opera are in this category. All psionics. All time travel. All aliens-who-are-indistinguishable-from-humans.

Whatever you want to put into your story, it’s fine. Aliens that can eat practically anything are fine. All aliens are fine. The story comes first, last, and always. Realism is totally beside the point. What matters is plausibility in story terms, consistency in the within-story universe, readability in general.

B) And then there are details.

FINE, OKAY, details often matter a lot more than giant tropes, and here is where it makes sense to be a lot more rigorous about accuracy.

A lot of readers know roughly how much a sword should weigh or how far a horse can gallop without foundering. A significant number of readers will then know a lot of details about whatever random topic you care to name, and will therefore notice if you get those details wrong.

This leads me to do things like go on Facebook and ask, “Hey, how do you make a car blow up by shooting it? Can that work if you haven’t prepared the car beforehand?” To which the answer appears to be a resounding NO.

Or, “How can you positively for sure stop anybody from tracking your cellphone? Assume the government is not your friend.” To which the answer appears to be: Faraday bag or forget it. By the way, if you want to make SURE the bad guys can track phones, black magic is a useful adjunct to black-hat government goons.

Generally speaking, I don’t have to look up anything about the natural world, but there are exceptions. Google, would you care to provide many diagrams of knee anatomy from every angle? (I think I still have those somewhere.)

Anyway, the world of details is nigh-unto-infinite, and getting a very substantial proportion of details right means that your world gains verisimilitude no matter whether you’ve got unlikely tropes such as FTL, telepathy, or shapeshifting Chihuahuas smack dab in the middle of your plot.

So that’s what actually matters, and that’s where accuracy and realism actually shine.

Is there a third category?

C) Human nature

You can only do so much violence to human nature before your characters and your society become implausible to the point of ludicrous, and then your story falls apart. How far you can go depends on whether your readers are willing to follow you into implausibility. In my opinion, Sherwood Smith goes roughly as far as it’s possible to go in reducing sexual jealousy and in creating weird attitudes toward adulthood without rendering the world too unbelievable.

Various authors go much farther in creating unworkable societies. Some readers will follow them through their stories, but it’s tricky because 100% of readers are human (citation needed) and as a rule therefore readers do know what humans are like and how humans behave. An author needs to be skilled and put a lot more care into justifying their extremely weird and impossible society or most readers aren’t going to buy it. I’m thinking of novels where women are soldiers and do all the fighting and have all the political power and men are domestic and do child care. This is absolutely ludicrous unless the author kills 99.99% of the men in the backstory, and even then it’s still painfully implausible to hand the child care to the men. Offhand, it seems to me that if your society is weirder than Sparta, you’ve probably gone too far to maintain believability, especially in the absence of backstory explaining why your society can go farther than that. And EVEN THEN, if you just erase actual universal human instincts by means of authorial fiat, nobody is going to believe in your characters or your fictional society.

You can, of course, do a lot more with weird societies with no problem if you create the right alien species. This is one of the great things about SF, obviously. You can do all sorts of things with behavior as long as the people in those societies are based on some nonhuman species. To make your nonhuman species coherent (which is to say, realistic and believable), it helps to base them on a real species with coherent instincts, such as lions or elephants.

So … my first impulse (realism is nothing, story is everything) gets transmuted to a somewhat more limited rule that goes like this:

Realism and accuracy are not virtues in themselves. The story is everything. BUT, the story will lack a feeling of reality if the details are handled carelessly, or if the characters that populate the story, or their society, are so wildly implausible that readers can’t believe in them even if they try.

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