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Fantasy, Science, and Creativity: An Exclusive Guest Post from Moiya McTier, Author of The Milky Way
A bit Bill Bryson, a dash Mary Roach, the canvas of Neil deGrasse Tyson, and all the excitement of a Ms. Frizzle Magic School Bus field trip. With an expertise in astrophysics and folklore, Moiya McTier is the perfect tour guide for all of us to have gazed transfixed at the heavens, full of wonder and questions. The Milky Way is a delightful and constantly surprising treat! Thrilling, eye-opening, and just plain fun. Keep reading to find out how being a fantasy reader has made Moiya McTier the scientist she is today.
I have never watched Star Wars. Or The Expanse, or Interstellar, or most of your other sci-fi faves. This seems to blow everyone’s minds. You tell people you have a PhD in astrophysics, and they assume you love science fiction! But the truth is that I’ve always been more into fantasy. I stumbled my way to astronomy only as an adult, but I’ve spent my entire life obsessed with magic.
Believe it or not, devouring fantasy stories actually made me a better scientist. It didn’t help with the math or computer coding parts, obviously, but it did give me the right mindset.
Most people have never met a scientist, but there’s a stereotype that we’re rigid, methodical people who know things. That’s about as true as the rumor that all scientists are white dudes in lab coats. I am evidence against both misconceptions. In reality, scientists are messy, complicated people just like everyone else, and our job is to learn things. Scientists spend their careers grasping beyond the edge of our collective understanding, hoping like Tantalus to grab something that will finally sate their curiosity.
But those tasty morsels of discovery are elusive, so the best scientists are the ones who can get creative in their quest for knowledge. They’re the ones with imaginations wild enough to dream up new experiments. The ones who are willing to question everything they think they know when they find new evidence, morphing their worldview with ease.
Unfortunately, so many people find it difficult to deal with the changing flow of information, incorporating the new and discarding the old. (Think of all the confusion surrounding COVID-19 as health officials went back and forth on the efficacy of masks, hand-washing, and social distancing throughout the pandemic.) But this kind of mental shifting is old hat for people like me who are used to hopping from one magical world to another. Throwing myself into fantasy worlds as a kid ingrained in me the idea that anything is possible, that knowledge and surprise can come from anywhere, and that everything can change at any moment.
Laini Taylor’s Strange the Dreamer prepared me for the discovery of the Higgs boson particle. Tamora Pierce’s Trickster series helped me understand the dual nature of light as both a particle and a wave. Jim Henson’s Labyrinth gave me a way to understand the bouncy path photons take as they travel from a star’s core to its surface.
The time I spent in those worlds made me curious, innovative, and wary of a too-convenient finding — the trademarks of a great scientist, which I was! Until I realized I’d rather speak about scientific results than produce them. In those talks, I often reveal that I’ve never seen Star Wars. The crowd gasps, and I get to tell them my secret: I never fell in love with the adventure of space, but with the magic of it.
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