The Science in my Fantasy Writing

As some of you may have seen, I was invited to do an interview with Boomers on Books for their YouTube channel last weekend. I was approached for the interview last Friday, and we had everything set and scheduled to go live the next day. It did not give me much time to spread the word ahead of time, but I hope some of you were able to watch the livestream. If you were unable to watch live, the video has been uploaded to the Boomers on Books YouTube channel, and you can watch it here.

One of the questions that I was asked during the interview was if my background in microbiology plays a role in my writing. It does, in some ways, but I wasn’t able to fully explain each example during the livestream. I’d like to take the opportunity to elaborate a bit more on my answer to that question on this week’s blog.

While I have not specifically written about microbiology in my novels (yet), I have incorporated bits of real science within my stories. To give the reader a bit more about my background, I have always been fascinated by science. During the first part of my college days, I was “undeclared” for a major, torn between going into genetics, microbiology, entomology (I love bugs!), music (I play the flute and was good enough to make All-State in high school), or general biology. I eventually settled on microbiology—but the degree program required a large amount of chemistry courses, as well as genetics, physics, and higher-level math—so I have basic knowledge of much more than just microbes. While most of my post-college career has been working in microbiology labs, I did work for a couple years as a chemist (or as I like to joke with my co-workers, a “pretend chemist”).

Throughout everything, I have been a writer. As I grew older, I realized I enjoy stories that have an element of reality to them, even if they are set in a fantastical world or another universe entirely, and I wanted to capture some of that in my own writing.

I believe my first real foray into bringing science into fantasy writing was while I was working on Hunted. There is some talk about genetics at one point in the story, and how the summoners’ and hunters’ unique abilities stem from a rare gene that both factions inherit. The basis for this discussion within the novel is Mendelian inheritance, one of the major principles covered in any genetics class. There are other, more complicated methods of genetic inheritance, but for the purpose of Hunted, I did not want to dive too deeply into the science, fearing it would detract from the overall story. (While I personally know many scientists, given my career path, I also understand that many readers do not enjoy a download of information in the context of a fictional book, particularly if the concepts are unfamiliar to them. The science within the story is not a major focus, and only exists to add an element of realism to it.)

Fast forward almost a decade to 2019, when I began writing The Caein Legacy. This series is a more typical, sword and sorcery type of fantasy, but even in the context of that world, I’ve found a few places to add a little science into the story.

The first big piece of that comes from the main character, Andrew, who is half-human and half-dragon. There is some magic involved with his existence, but I did draw on a few things from real science as well. For example, one of my beta readers asked me why Andrew could never have children, and my answer comes from the simple fact that most non-plant hybrid species in nature are sterile, so I incorporated that into his character.

I have also mentioned a few times that I have struggled with the concept of fire-breathing dragons, and have yet to come up with a biological explanation for such a trait. That being said, the dragons of The Caein Legacy (and of my previous works) do not breathe fire. (Just to clarify, I have nothing against authors who write about fire-breathing dragons; they are incredible and fascinating to think about and can add an element of chaos and/or power to a story. I simply prefer to keep my own dragons out of that realm because my mind can’t come up with a logical explanation for such an ability, and I feel obligated to explain certain elements of a creature’s biology.)

One of my favorite races that came out of The Caein Legacy were the Corodan. These are very large, intelligent insects, and I had a lot of fun coming up with how they work. It’s mentioned early on in Exile that the Corodan have a means of communication that requires no vocalization (I don’t believe I explicitly stated in the books that they use pheromones to communicate, but that is what I was alluding to. This method of communication is fairly commonplace among insects.) The leader of the Corodan, the hive-queen, can use her pheromones to compel every other member of the hive to do as she wishes. Female Corodan are capable of making vocalizations, and are often tasked to deliver messages or act as emissaries, depending on the needs of the hive. As I mentioned earlier, I love bugs, and creating an intelligent race of insects was so much fun!

There is also an encounter with the Venom-weavers in the second book, Guardian. The Venom-weavers are spiders, and they are decidedly not friendly to outsiders. Without giving too much away, I’ll just say the encounter does not end well for everyone involved. Like the Corodan, the Venom-weavers are capable of communicating with one another, but their language is indecipherable to most other species. It incorporates clicks and rasps that others incorrectly consider to be noises made while the creatures are moving about. The Venom-weavers are cunning and malicious, and are known to lay traps and plan ambushes for their “prey”. There are certain species of spider in the real world that are known to work together (social spiders), and many more that do not rely on webs to catch their prey, but are ambush predators (jumping spiders, tarantulas). I drew inspiration from several different species of spider to create the Venom-weavers.

Perhaps one day I will add something into one of my stories that relates more to microbiology, but at present, I have no immediate plans. Given the current circumstances in our world, I don’t feel any desire to write about microbes or communicable disease, fictional or not; I’m sure there is already enough of that being done. For now, I’ll stick to microbiology in my lab, and writing about the larger varieties of “bugs” in my books.

Thanks for reading!