http://scripts.iucr.org/cgi-bin/paper?S1600577514025715

The fiction I write right now is almost exclusively science fiction, often with a cyberpunk or a nanotech element.  That hasn’t always been the case, I’ve done turns with low-fantasy and historical fantasy, but right now the things that interest me, the “what-ifs” that have potential are in the sciences.

So when I find something that relates directly to a what-if (in this case I’m building a world where nanotech-scale tools are prevalent) I do my digging to see where the technology actually is, and where it might go from here.

When you get to the nanoscale level, all kinds of interesting new requirements come into play.  You have to account for things like the temperature of the room, the amount of expansion in an instrument because of the heat generated by the bulb that illuminates your experiment area.  Things get very *very* precise and so developments in that precision because very important.

All of my science is informed.  I may choose to use a “pop-sci” version of that science, but that’s almost always a conscious decision to try to keep my stories more accessible, to try and keep them out of the realm of “hard” science fiction and so touch a broader audience.