Manifesto - why I write SF

Maintain the Balance between the Story and the Science with Grace.

This is my motto, my manifesto. Now what does that mean though?
I am a science fiction writer. I write SF in the timeframe where the first quarter of the 21st century since the time of Jesus Christ is well underway.
Almost half a century ago, say the time of the moon landing or so, here is what happened: Hollywood took over, and said to Arthur Clarke / Isaac Asimov / Robert Heinlein / H G Wells / Jules Verne / Mary Shelley et al, “All right move over now, your role is done. Now that we have landed on the moon, science fiction has served its purpose. Science has caught up with the fiction visionaries, thank you very much. Entertainment and science can part ways now, we'll just hire engineers and technicians and do it all with CGI. The time of SF is over; it is now the age of Sci-Fi.”

And the public went along with it.

But well, it might not work that way, at least not for too far.

Yes, the public focus moved away from SF and towards Sci-Fi over the past few decades, but hey, the moon landing is not an end state; it is just one small step. SF will continue to be needed if we want an upward trend towards becoming civilized. Focus will duly swing back when the time is right. And I believe that I belong in this domain, as one of the receivers/transmitters of this swing-back.

Hence, I categorize myself as a 21^st Century SF writer. Maybe the ancestry for this aim goes back to Don Quixote, for all I know. Or maybe not, and it does turn out to be a phoenix-like line of work, and will keep emerging from the embers. Who knows?

In any case, this is the domain where I have hung out my shingle.

In that context - here is what my motto/manifesto means.
SF is perennially experiencing a tug of war between storytelling and science.
Storytelling is currently championed by Hollywood (as exemplified by Syd Field's “Screenplay”) and actively driven by the current (i.e. 21st century) form of literary tropes. But it is nothing new though, it is something which carries the vintage of the Jataka Tales, the Greek tragedies of Sophocles et al, the Upanishads in the post Vedic contexts, and similar such constructs across all human cultures, probably goes back at least to Paleolithic times, or even before.

I will not set the stage yet for what science means in the context of SF - that will evolve as we go. But broadly speaking, we do know what science means, at least modulo Popperian falsification or Feyerabendian Anarchism or Lakatos' fights with monsters.
So anyhow - these two forces are at a tug of war.
Storytelling asks of the SF writer to provide an immersion experience, to be vivid, to show the reader the universe as it is being built, in a way they can identify with.
Science constrains the SF writer per established edifices, to which due homage must be rendered.
So, if the writer wants to portray a boron-based being for example, will the skin be smooth, will they have hair? Will their atmosphere be ammonia, or what?  Will their world have a sun that is of the typical kind, yellow red or blue, or something else?

Whereas in that same context, the tropes of storytelling might lead to a decision such as - "throw in a sun that is striped like a lollipop," Why not? It might have some compelling narrative benefits, possibly?
Science will shudder - what about the edifice of the behavior of polytropic spheres, the Lane-Emden equation and all that?
Storytelling will retort back - "if the story is good, don’t hold back - the universe will have a place for it, and science will catch up at some point".

And furthermore, in this day and age the constraints are not trivial, they are formidable. Even a single paragraph of a work of SF will hinge upon tens if not hundreds of pertinent sciences. There is no practical way to ensure consistency with all applicable edifices therein. It cannot humanly be achieved within the typical time-frame of writing a book to make sure that every sentence and every description adheres and conforms and works within the constraints of all applicable edifices, even if one chooses to allocate an entire lifetime to just one book.
So, all right then, what should an SF writer do? My answer is – one should use judgment and a sense of balance – and where necessary throw in the occasional striped lollipop star if the flow so warrants it. But, we must be as graceful as possible, about such tropes.

Now what does graceful mean?

I'll explain on the basis of a little bit of a personal back-story.
When I was an arrogant and misguided youngster (maybe I still am for all I know, but specifically I am talking about when I was in my early twenties, biological age wise), I used to hate most mainstream human pursuits and pastimes, including movies. I used to think they were trite as a whole in terms of their defining characteristic, and contributed to the dragging down of human net worth. Oh I was a bundle of joy all right.

On one occasion someone dragged me along to watch a movie, and in it, there was this song "Tu cheez badi hai mast mast".
With that song, something clicked for me. I ran headlong into the blood-rush of Mumbai magic, the world of glamour.

For a while thereafter, I was all gung-ho about mainstream pop culture pastimes.

Then, one day I happened to listen to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's "Dum Mast Kalandar Mast Mast", the original song.

To this day I still feel the aftershocks of the outrage.

How could Bollywood do something like that, copy from such a master source and then demean and degrade it? And how could I myself have fallen for that? My instincts should have warned me.  All my old prejudices surged back up with vengeance, even stronger.

Anyway, that was back then.

In more recent times I happened to see a TV interview/documentary of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, where he mentioned something to the effect that he owes a significant debt of gratitude to the Mumbai film industry, for helping bring his gift to life by taking it to the people. Along the course of that interview he also mentioned some of the things about Bollywood which had caused him pain. Especially poignant for me was something one of his disciples said during that portion of the interview, to the effect that "there was one particular thing which nearly broke the relationship for him". They did not elaborate, but I feel that they were referring to that song and the travesty.

Now, a spirit source like Nusrat is like a god parent, and a storytelling medium such as Bollywood or Hollywood, is like a child.
Breaking that relationship is like the parent disowning the child. That is a real tragedy.
As storytellers, we should never let that happen.
A spirit source can be a Sufi singer, or could be a scientific edifice like the Lane-Emden equation for polytropic spheres, or any other such. Whatever the source, we have to always respect the parent. Don’t let the relationship break.
That - is what I mean by "try to be as graceful as possible about using such tropes".