Neptune BLUE!

I spent a day-and-a-half on Friday and Saturday researching the planet Neptune in order be able to write a scene in Galaxy Federal about a Neptunian planet.

All my fiction entails a high degree of research, since I am an expert in nothing other than writing itself yet I seek to convey great verisimilitude and accuracy in my work. One of my greatest hopes for my fiction is that people will be able to read it and, when my prose touches on their areas of expertise, they'll be able to nod in satisfaction and say "That's how it really is." And, so, I am ever researching things as I write.

But most of this stuff is just flesh for the background. When, in contrast, a scene comes around where I have to research literally every part of it, it becomes a much more demanding exercise! In this case I wanted to be able to describe Cherry standing on a platform at the top of a Neptunian world, and, while this may sound like a simple ask—"It's blue, right? And cloudy?"—it's definitely not.

What is the composition of the atmosphere? What color is the sky above? What color are the clouds? Are there different types of clouds? Are they above or below? What are their shapes? What are the wind conditions? Relative to what? What are the temperature conditions? At different altitudes? What are the pressure conditions? What consequences of extremely low-pressure environments should I be aware of? Where do all the different sky and cloud colors come from? How do the colors compare to one another? What do the near-infrared and near-UV look like? Might there precipitation? What would it be like? What would the air smell like? How would sunset affect the colors of whatever happens to be visible? Is there any relevant photochemistry affecting atmospheric conditions, and if so what is it? Can the planet's rings be inclined outside the equatorial plane? What is its gravity? How bright is its sun?

Most of these questions need to be answered not in order to literally convey the information in prose, but simply to make sure that I don't accidentally get the narrative details wrong. There are resources that describe Neptune's highest clouds as reddish; others say white; others still say bluish—and all of them are referring to those clouds as seen from above, not below.

I do have some control over the variables. A question like "How windy is it?" can be answered "Right now, it's whatever you need for it to be." But that's sloppy, and I like to minimize my slop. So, for precision, someone like me would have to go and learn a little bit about the Neptunian winds—all while taking care not to overgeneralize Neptune's specific example. (Thankfully we have Uranus for a comparison, but unfortunately Uranus isn't always so helpful, as it basically looks like a sleeping kitten.)

Another confounding factor is that the Internet seems to be becoming a worse and worse medium for doing this kind of esoteric fact-based research. Many resources are simply not reliable (being little more than unaudited discussions on message forums), and the search results are forever clogged with irrelevant or insufficiently detailed results. ("Hey, kids! Did you know that Neptune is a PLANET and that it is BLUE?!") At one point I thought about just buying a whole book on Neptune, but I discounted that because, for one thing, scope creep, and, for another thing, Neptunian planetary science is a surprisingly active area of research and we are still learning fundamentally new things about Neptune's atmosphere even today. Lots of books about it are already outdated!

I enjoy research, thankfully, and I certainly put in a tour-de-force for this one, reading dozens of webpages and watching hours of videos. I dodged a lot of bullets because of my research, like not accidentally having my characters' blood boil by setting the air pressure below the Armstrong Limit. And in the end, I wrote a good, solid, 2,500-word scene. It's beautiful, and, I hope, it's breathtaking.

But even so, for all my research I was aware that I am still not actually any closer to being an expert on Neptunian worlds, and I knew that my research was very thin by this measure, and that my depth of understanding remains poor. And so I knew the likelihood for mistakes was high—and that's not even counting the areas where I decided to give up and let slop win. (In the end I just made up an answer for the question of what the air smells like.)

Sure enough, a few hours after I had finished writing the scene on Saturday night, it occurred to me: "Wait a minute, J! What would it sound like to talk in that air, if one were to breathe it in? It's almost entirely hydrogen and helium!"

I rushed back and did a bit of emergency research, and discovered the answer that I had feared, and had to revise the scene accordingly to ensure that anyone inhaling that air speaks in a high pitched-voice. And that, my friends, is why some scenes are better in writing than in movies!

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