Plausible science fiction builds stories on real physics. This piece takes a look at the emerging genre covers The Three-Body Problem, Dark Matter and Project Hail Mary, plus Revelation Equation. Learn more at https://revelationequation.com
In 2012, physicists at CERN announced that the Large Hadron Collider had found the Higgs boson, the particle the press had nicknamed the “God particle.” For a few days, a discovery from the far edge of theoretical physics was front-page news around the world. People who had never opened a physics textbook were suddenly reading about quantum fields and the mysteries of the universe. Since then, more and more writers have been building fiction on that same kind of real science, and readers have started looking for stories that feel like they could actually happen. Today I want to talk about that shift, and about what some people are now calling plausible science fiction.
For most of its history, science fiction gave itself a lot of room to bend the rules. Spaceships crossed the galaxy faster than light. Time machines worked with the flip of a switch. Very few readers stopped to ask how any of it worked. There has always been a smaller tradition, usually called hard science fiction, that tries to respect real physics, but for a long time it was seen as a niche for engineers and scientists. What seems to be changing now is the size of that audience. Readers who follow news from CERN, listen to physics podcasts and pick up string theory books for fun are bringing higher expectations to the stories they choose.
Several well-known novels show how far this approach has already come. Take Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem. In Ken Liu’s English translation, it won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2015. The story opens with physicists whose particle accelerator results suddenly stop making sense, and the mystery behind those broken experiments drives the whole trilogy. Netflix adapted it as the series 3 Body Problem in 2024.
Then there’s Blake Crouch’s 2016 novel Dark Matter, which heads into the multiverse. Its main character is a physicist who gets pulled into a series of parallel versions of his own life. The book draws on real ideas from quantum mechanics about particles existing in more than one state at once. Apple TV+ released a series based on it in 2024, and that brought the idea of other dimensions to a much wider audience.
Andy Weir has built a whole career on this style of writing. He first posted The Martian chapter by chapter on his own website, and readers with science backgrounds sent him corrections as the story went along. He carried that habit of checking the math into Project Hail Mary, published in 2021. It follows a science teacher solving one physics and biology problem after another to save Earth, and a film version starring Ryan Gosling reached theaters in 2026.
There’s even been an organized push in this direction. Back in 2004, the writer Geoff Ryman and a group of colleagues published a short manifesto for what they called Mundane SF. The idea was to set aside faster-than-light travel and other impossible devices, and to write about science that could plausibly exist. The movement itself stayed small, but its central idea has spread across the genre.
Newer projects are taking these ideas in their own directions. One of them comes from Sam D. Toney, a retired board-certified psychiatrist, who is currently writing a novel called Revelation Equation. Its central character spends decades developing a working formula drawn from quantum theory, particle physics and dimensional mechanics, and the story builds toward a test of that formula at CERN. Toney calls this approach plausible sci-fi, meaning fiction that stays as close as possible to established science.
Much like Andy Weir’s early work, this project is unfolding in public. Pieces of the story are being shared as the book develops, and readers can follow along through a forum and through blog posts on string theory, the multiverse and the relationship between science and spirituality. That last theme sets it a little apart from the other books I’ve mentioned, since the novel also explores identity, purpose, consciousness and the nature of truth.
Now, writing plausible science fiction does come with real challenges. Science moves quickly, and a novel that feels accurate today can look dated within ten years. Some of the most popular ideas in the genre are also still unproven. String theory, for example, has never been confirmed by experiment, and searches at the Large Hadron Collider have so far turned up no direct evidence of extra dimensions. So writers in this space have to decide how far past the known science they’re willing to go, and how clearly they want to show where fact ends and imagination begins.
There’s another risk too, and it’s that the physics can crowd out the people. Readers might enjoy a careful explanation of particle collisions, but they stay for characters they care about. The books that have found big audiences tend to pair their research with fear, curiosity and personal stakes that anyone can recognize.
So where does this leave the genre? Whether plausible sci-fi ends up as a label on bookstore shelves or stays an informal description, the appetite behind it looks likely to keep growing. Readers are looking for books about multiverse theory, for stories that touch on science and spirituality, and for books that trust them to follow real ideas. The writers meeting that demand range from award-winning novelists with streaming adaptations to independent authors sharing their drafts online. Together, they suggest that the space between what science has found and what fiction imagines is becoming a more interesting place to tell stories. If you’d like to follow Revelation Equation as it’s being written, you can find it at the link in the description. Sam Toney City: Thonotosassa Address: 10072 Main Street Website: https://revelationequation.com