How to Research for a Science Fiction Novel: A Beginner’s Guide

It was on a drunken night that I had this idea about writing a science fiction novel. Trust me, I am someone who grew up reading Stephen King, Rowling, Salman Rushdie, and never once did I imagine that I would sit down and spend 5-6 years of my life working on something that would ultimately become the one work that I am truly proud of. That accident turned into my latest 2026 novel, and it is the one science fiction novel I will happily defend in any room.

I had this vision, this idea, and I knew that it would require a lot of my time and energy to bring everything together. So, I did what any other sensible person would have done in my place — I opened YouTube and started looking for quantum worlds, wormholes, and black holes.

One video led me to Dr. Matt O’Dowd, then another one took me to Dr. Becky, and soon I was deep into Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s PBS series Closer to Truth.

I checked the videos, I read the papers, I watched the videos because, see, I was not only writing a science fiction novel or a speculative science fiction novel, if you have to call it that… I had to make sure that if someone who understands the science behind the threshold and the tunnel comes and reads my book, then they should at least say: “Okay, the story was alright. The science was almost correct.”

My goal was to get that ‘almost’ because, see, I am no scientist; I don’t understand the maths behind these wormholes. But I have a good imaginative skill, and if you tell me something, then I will start picturing it, and that is what I did when I started to research my science fiction novel, NANDI — Mission to JAVI-1517.

So, here’s my take/understanding of how a professional writer researches science for a science fiction novel without pretending to be a scientist:

Stop Becoming a Scientist for Science Fiction Novel

See, you don’t need to become a scientist to talk about science. Space science fiction has this reputation of demanding a physics degree at the door, and you don’t need one to write hard science fiction novels either. I am not Jonathan Nolan, who could register at a university just to understand how a black hole works.

He actually did that, by the way. Jonathan Nolan spent 4 years on the Interstellar script and studied relativity at Caltech while he was writing it. Unfortunately, most of us will never get that door opened for us. But you know, I have realized after writing this book that most of us also don’t need it.

Try to understand this from my perspective — a physicist has to prove the thing. He/she will have to make sure that they ultimately find that missing X. But not me… I only have to make sure the thing behaves the same way on page 40 and on page 340 as the scientist or some other researcher has claimed in their book. I had to make sure of another thing: that a reader who actually studied this stuff closes the book without feeling insulted. Now those are two completely different amounts of homework, and once you accept that, the panic drops or increases [depending on you, honestly!]

That is the entire contract behind hard science fiction novels, and nobody tells you this at the start.

But here is the trap, though.

The day you decide you will “master” the physics before writing Chapter 1 of your science fiction novel, you have quietly given yourself permission to never write Chapter 1. I know writers who have been researching their novel since 2019. And I am not even ashamed to say this, but I myself have folders with research and video URLs for my other stories. I have PDFs, I have documents, but not a single draft of them…

After writing this novel for so long, I can finally and happily say that you research to write a science fiction novel. You never write to finish researching.

Most of the best sci-fi books on my shelf were written by people who started before they felt ready.

Research Science Fiction Novel Like a Tourist First

Everyone is embarrassed about the YouTube stage. Please, don’t be. YouTube is where you learn the shape of an idea. But you need to make sure that you are learning from the right teachers.

I once opened a YouTube video only to find myself wondering, am I fit for this subject or not?

And then I came across Dr. Becky, and she won my heart.

When Dr. Becky explained how a supermassive black hole starves its own galaxy, she did not hand me an equation. She did her best to give me a picture that my brain can hold and understand.

Something similar is what Matt O’Dowd did on PBS Space Time.

This is what I also found on Closer to Truth, where what fascinated me was the fact of seeing people disagreeing with each other on camera, without resolving the topics.

After the shape, you go looking for the source. Here is the ladder I actually climbed for my sci-fi book, in order, and it is the same ladder I would hand to anyone starting out with hard science fiction novels:

Stage	What you take from it	What you must never take from it
YouTube explainers	The mental picture, the vocabulary, the names of the open questions	Any specific number, date, or claim you plan to print
Popular science books by working scientists	The reasoning chain, why the field believes what it believes	The metaphor, repeated word for word, as if it were the physics
Review papers and lecture notes	The map of the whole subfield, and who disagrees with whom	Confidence that you now understand the derivations
Primary papers on arXiv, ADS, AJP, CQG	The exact constraint, stated by the people who found it	Sentences you copy without being able to explain them out loud
A living human who does this for a living	Correction, and the questions you did not know to ask	Their reputation, borrowed to defend your fiction

The books matter more than people admit. Kip Thorne’s The Science of Interstellar and Becky Smethurst’s A Brief History of Black Holes are written by researchers who deliberately chose to be understood. Read them the way you read good science fiction books — for the reasoning, and never for the lines you want to argue about.

If you are writing space science fiction, the review papers will also tell you which part of your setting the field has already settled and which part nobody agrees on yet. That second list is where your story gets to live.

And then there are the papers. Man, the internet is filled with them! I mean, you just know what to type, and it will bring information that you yourself know you need.

And to understand those papers as a writer who is interested in writing science fiction, you don’t need to understand maths. You don’t need to understand theorems or why something is happening THAT particular way. All you need to understand or follow (if I have to be precise) is the abstract, the introduction, the section where they list assumptions, and the discussion at the end where they admit what their model cannot do.

I have found this last section to be the most important part in any scientific paper for a novelist working on hard science fiction novels, because it somehow opens the doors for us where we can make changes as needed by our characters.

The Whole Game Is Hidden Inside the Word “Almost”

I said in the beginning that I wanted a physicist to close my sci-fi book and say the science was almost correct. That word is carrying an enormous amount of weight, so let me discuss it to the best of my ability.

When writing fiction, and that, too, science fiction, most readers will get confused between three different things.

Accuracy + Plausibility + Consistency = Trust that your reader shows when they read your book.

Hard science fiction novels get judged on this equation more harshly than any other kind of story, and every sci-fi book that readers later call a must-read book of all time holds that equation from the first page to the last.

Ask What It Looks Like, Not What It Proves

We all remember watching Interstellar and the scene that shows how time dilation works. Nolan played with us on an emotional level when he revealed how Dr. Romilly waited alone on the ship for 23 years, 4 months, and 8 days, but for Cooper, time passed very differently.

Now imagine if Nolan did not show this and used a different mechanism for you to understand this!

I think it would not have left that impact on you, right?

So, here’s the thing that I started to do when I wrote this science fiction novel. When someone explained something to me, I didn’t ask for the maths. I asked what it looks like. When someone said, “This is how threshold works.” I said, “No, don’t tell… make me imagine it.”

That is the trick hiding inside the good sci-fi books of all time. They hand you the picture first, and the proof can wait in the appendix, or in such personal essays.

And this is not a newly invented method. When Carl Sagan was writing Contact, he needed a way to move his character across the galaxy without breaking physics. So what did he do? He called his friend Kip Thorne, and they both worked the problem backward. Together, they came back with a solution to Einstein’s field equations that describes wormholes that humans could survive.

Do you see what happened here? A storyteller asked a question, and then a physicist answered it and helped the field progress in the right direction. People still call Contact a must-read book of all time, and that entire spine of the story exists because a novelist asked for a picture instead of a proof.

Fun Fact: The Interstellar visual effects team went the other way. They built a renderer to draw Thorne’s black hole properly for IMAX and discovered new things about gravitational lensing that nobody had computed before. You can read the same in their 2015 paper, ‘Gravitational lensing by spinning black holes in astrophysics, and in the movie Interstellar’, published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.

And This Works Even If You Never Write Science Fiction Novel

Everything above is how I run research for articles that I write for my clients in my company.

I have had writers cover clinical topics, enterprise infrastructure, solar hardware, and translation technology.

For me, the pattern never changes:

1. We need to get the shape from something accessible
2. We need to chase the primary sources
3. We need to find the constraints that someone from the marketing team is hiding.
4. We need to ask someone a very specific question.
5. We need to remove something that we cannot even explain.
6. We need to tell the readers where the certainty ends.

For me, this is what would make you a writer who uses technical jargon in a way that would benefit those readers who come to you only for the sake of a good story.

After writing this science fiction novel for years, I still don’t understand the maths behind wormholes. I am clueless if you write something on the wall and ask me to explain why it happened.

But I know the science of my science fiction novel. I know why the wormhole became traversable. I know why my character’s REM cycle is showing something that affects their research. Because the job was never to teach you about wormholes, oscillation cycles, or even harmonics. The job was, is, and will remain one — to help you imagine a dying guy, looking at a wormhole, and thinking about his dead sister.

I did not write this science fiction novel to land on somebody’s list of must read book of all time. If that dying guy makes you cry, the sci-fi book has done its work. Everything else was only homework.